Published 2017.08.22
Revised 2024.02.20
In some fashion or another, I’ve been working on technology products for over 20 years. And, as you’d expect, I’ve learned a lot in this time. These learnings have come from many sources, including formal education, on-the-job training, self-study, painful mistakes, and dumb luck. I am thankful for all of these lessons, and especially thankful to the many brilliant and kind-hearted mentors I’ve had throughout my life. These mentors have come in all forms, professors and students, ceos and interns, managers and reports, hiring managers and candidates, executives and administrative assistants, account managers and customer support representatives, and many more. I strongly believe in the importance of paying things forward, and throughout my career I’ve tried my best to offer my thoughts and perspectives to those who are interested. While everyone’s situation is personal and often unique, there are several singular thoughts and experiences that I seem to share with others with great frequency. In the hopes that these may help as reference points for such discussions, and, perhaps, to help others struggling to gain and/or convey insight into these topics, I offer the following.
This thread is dedicated to the many great mentors I’ve had throughout my career; I am incredibly grateful to have met and learned from them.
Disclaimer: Everything that follows is my personal belief based on my personal experience, and not necessarily those of any employer, affiliated people, or affiliated organizations. Like everyone else, I have both known and unknown biases: caveat emptor.
Introduction to Product Management
Published 2017.08.22 and updated 2024.02.20
I got my first formal introduction to Product Management in 2000, while working at a rapidly growing software company in San Francisco (Micromuse, purchased by IBM in 2005 for $865 million – over $1.3 B in 2023 $). Most stories of people starting in high tech involve being “thrust into” a central role and “drinking from the firehose.” Rest assured my experience also follows this pattern. While I probably couldn’t articulate this at the time, in hindsight there were three great sources of data from which I, eventually, figured out how to be an effective product manager.
The first was the on-the-job training my manager provided me daily. Not only was he one of my most influential mentors, he was probably also the most patient: we discussed Product Management for at least 30 minutes nearly every day, and he never (visibly) tired of explaining concepts, answering questions, and sharing experiences. He also paved the way for the other two ways I figured out what Product Management was about.
- He made sure I was among the first to attend the Pragmatic Marketing’s Product Management course. (Aside: I’ll likely have more to say about this course in a later post, but I will share a) I have no financial interest in the company, b) I learned a lot from the course, and c) reports and colleagues who I have advised to attend the course speak very positively about it).
- He taught me, largely by example, to seek out diverse viewpoints and listen to everyone in an endless quest for data. He helped me understand that even people who I thought were biased, disgruntled, checked-out, or whatever often had good ideas and, even when they didn’t, the more I understood their experiences the more I could think about business problems from end-to-end. And these discussions also gave me the opportunity to reevaluate my all-too-often incomplete or wholly incorrect assessments of my many product stakeholders.
To be clear, there was no single book, framework, class, or person who taught me what Product Management was about. And I doubt there is any single silver bullet for anyone else learning the ropes. I’ll even go as far as to doubt that any one method works for “nearly everyone.” Mastery of anything is a journey, and people learn and experience differently.