Be Your Feature’s Best Skeptic
In addition to it’s best advocate
A common trap PM’s fall into is focusing solely on feature advocacy. The unspoken assumption behind this is that being successful as a PM means shipping more features than the next guy. That assumption is flawed in many ways (like success is zero sum, like the feature is “yours”…), but most importantly, because more is not necessarily better.
Being a successful PM means you ship successful features, not just more features. And one of the better ways to ensure success is to be skeptical about it.
One of my interview questions is to tell the candidate that I am fond of saying “one sign of a great PM is that he is willing to cut his own feature” and then I ask them why that would be the case. It’s surprisingly rare to get a good answer to this. It takes a fair amount of experience to reach this conclusion.
The answer is that it is not our goal to ship whatever features come our way. It’s our goal to ship the most impactful features we can collectively think of given our product’s goals. The ones with the highest VPCH — Value Per Coding Hour. I used to say ROI as short hand for this but FYI that term can trigger people at Apple 😬.
