10 Dilbert strips that show a Product Manager’s life

Dilbert, the comic strip all about business life by Scott Adams, was first published in 1989, meaning Dilbert has been suffering at the hands of his corporate bosses for over 30 years.

The genius of Adams’ work is the distillation of corporate life into (mostly) three small images, and he’s approached all aspects of organisational operations, include product.

The following 10 strips all show the challenges faced by product managers in their day-to-day existence.

As product people, we’re the voice of the customer, but as is so often the case, the organisation can get caught up in their own priorities. We must hit X target, deliver Y feature, or reduce Z metric, and we then prioritize features or products that try to deliver on this, whilst often ignoring what our customers are saying (despite what the customer saying often leading us towards our goals, just maybe in a different way).

Ah, the age old problem of prioritisation and over-thinking. We work hard as teams to try and get the organisation to structure the requests that they have for improving the product, looking to them to provide us with information that allows us to make informed decisions on what’s going to deliver the most value.