Product Management Philosophy
The Profile of an Excellent Product Manager 1.0 - Fall 2021
There are a ton of books and videos available to help make you a better product manager. Rightfully there’s been a lot of focus on customer-centricity, discovery practices, rapid learning, iteration, being metrics and goal driven, working within agile, etc. A lot of the content is focused on what I’d call product management domain knowledge - things you really only read if you are in this field. Mastering these topics is important, but not sufficient for a product manager to be awesome in the role. During my experience as a product leader I started to appreciate the role personality plays in the success of a good PM and then as I started to research decision making, judgement, and bias I realized there was a need to address that as a 3rd and equally important element. The idea for this site, my content, and my consulting practice are all based in some level on this profile of an excellent product manager.
After lots of iteration I’ve landed on the following 3 factors as the key determinants of successful product managers. As you can tell my strongest skill is not illustration, but I felt like the original napkin sketch captured it well:
Read More About Specific Elements of the Product Manager Profile
Below you will find links to posts written specifically about each attribute, what I mean by each as related to product management, and ideas for how you can try to improve on each dimension.
I also wrote this post that gives an overview of all 3 major categories and how I came up with this model in the first place.
If you’d like to use this framework to help coach and develop your team, read this post and you’ll find a PDF download with a ready-to-go template.
Personality
Judgement & Decision Making Ability
“Product management is a daily test of decision making ability and judgement.”
Not just another product management best practice site…hopefully
Product Leaders was founded with a few objectives:
Give back to the Product Management community and help people advance in their careers
Expose non-product professionals to the field and how a strong product function can transform your business
Provide some new and unique content focused on the intersection of decision making, judgement, and Product Management
The Role of Product in a Company
I’m a strong believer (no surprise) that Product should have a strong leadership role within companies, driving customer-centricity and alignment to a compelling product vision and strategy across the business. I wrote an article about my perspective on this leadership role. In general I don’t feel like I’m contributing a ton of new perspective to the role product should play so much as echoing the words of Marty Cagan and many others before me.