The Impossible Product Manager, a.k.a. the "Great" Product Manager

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Original Article: The Impossible Product Manager, a.k.a. the "Great" Product Manager

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What makes a Product Manager great? The prolific Shreyas Doshi1 gives us the list of requirements in a tweet-storm:

1 I highly recommend following @Shreyas, despite the following critique; he is a font of wisdom I have bookmarked and swiped many times.

• Great PMs consistently and singularly improve the company’s trajectory.
• Great PMs are masters of the art of blending quantitative and qualitative inputs, as warranted by each individual situation.
• Great PMs become the worldwide experts in their domain. When new to a domain, great PMs bootstrap this process by seeking the counsel of existing worldwide experts.
• Great PMs are diligent about using a variety of user research methods to inform what product to build in the first place.
• Great PMs also listen to what isn’t said [by customers] and anticipate where the industry overall is headed when developing their product hypothesis.
• Great PMs know that buy-in isn’t enough; you need passion & ownership to build great products. Great PMs facilitate discussions that get the entire team to come up with creative product ideas.
• Great PMs understand task leverage and spend the majority of their time on the highest-leverage tasks for the company.
• Great PMs, in the rare instances of product failure, improve not just their own approach but they also share the lessons learned with the broader company.
• Great PMs are adaptive—they have a wide repertoire [of tools and processes and workflows] that they expertly tweak for each specific team’s needs.
• Great PMs are outstanding problem preventers. Great PMs are discerning about which problems to prevent, which problems to solve, and which problems not to solve.
• Great PMs edit the company’s product ethos—they identify the unintended flaws in the principles, fix the flawed parts—and only then follow & espouse it.
• Great PMs know that career ladders are imperfect proxies: they’re more fixated on tangible competence & impact than on checking off boxes on the ladder.
• Great PMs also learn through work projects, but they learn a lot more about their craft in their personal time because of their curiosity & passion for self-improvement.
• Great PMs ultimately decide what’s best for users & the business.
• Great PMs ensure the product strategy is optimal.
• Great PMs work hard but are rarely overwhelmed.

Haha, that last one is funny. Don’t be overwhelmed, but also “learn a lot more about your craft in your personal time.”

These recitals always include a little “out,” an opportunity for the writer to wriggle out of responsibility for commanding the impossible. Something like, “The final rule is: You can break any rule, if you know what you’re doing.” In this case, the 31st tweet:

Naturally, very few PMs are Great.

And I don’t know any Great PM who does all of the above, all of the time.

That’s because Great PMs know that these ideas should be viewed as signposts, not as commandments.

The job of “Product Manager” is nominally impossible, and perhaps so are its de...