14 Rules of conscious product management

Written by Eugene Nikiforov, PM at The Product Gene

Photo by Elijah Hiett on Unsplash

Recently I’ve been heavily invested in consciousness work. Among other facets of being a conscious human being, I’ve tried to understand, what approaches to product management and entrepreneurship are conscious and should be nurtured. In this post I’ve tried to collect a bunch of guidelines to being a conscious product manager. The list below is arbitrary and in some ways might reflect my personal biases.

1. Love your customer. Making your clients’ life easier and providing value to your customers should be your No1 priority. Any success metric is secondary to this core principal.
2. Do not do anything you wouldn’t tell your client about. Any unethical practices you might use in your job will corrupt the value you are providing. The rule of thumb for checking, whether you should do something is asking yourself: Can you tell your client about it? And never put growth metrics above ethics.
3. Do not work on the products you personally don’t believe in. Working on a product (or user problem if you are at the product discovery phase) that you do not fully believe in or care about may have serious repercussions for your mental health.
4. Do not work on the products that harm, exploit, make addicted or in other ways negatively influence lives of people or nature.
5. Be completely honest with clients, your team and stakeholder. Establishing the atmosphere of trust and transparency around you is a crucial principle for having a healthy workflow that everyone is comfortable with.
6. Reflect on your decisions and vision. Try to challenge them and reduce uncertainty by validating your ideas qualitatively or quantitatively.
7. Balance between applying frameworks, knowledge and common sense for solving problems. Being locked within several decision-making frameworks could be dangerous, as well as having none.
8. Be aware of cognitive biases that manipulate your perceptions and decision making. This list of popular cognitive biases is a good place to start research on them.
9. Recognise the needs and deeper motivation drivers of each member of the product team. Try helping everyone on the team to move toward their goal.
10. Do not manipulate. There are always some ways to leverage weak spots in the system to get what you want. Long-term, manipulations and shadow games always have repercussions and don’t bring you happiness, only amplify stress and anxiety.
11. Constantly reevaluate the processes, established in your team. The status quo sometimes may change very quickly, leaving you with obsolete and irrelevant processes.
12. Find your balance between strategic and tactical thinking. Both are extremely important for a PM. Switching between these two on a fly, evaluating problems from multiple perspectives is a sign of a conscious system thinker.
13. Keep work-life balance no matter what. It might be tempting to deep-dive into working late hours, especially it you are excited about your work and are a natural workaholic, but that always backfires in other aspects of your life. Heavy workaholism, especially the work-cult type, promoted by Jack Ma and others, is highly unconscious and prevents self-actualising.
14. Don’t be evil. This ex-Google motto perfectly summarises conscious approach to the workplace communications.

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