Fetishism About Product Management
I see a trend of people wanting to become a product manager and changing their career towards product management. In a sense, it is a good thing. More people becoming product-conscious and adopting a product-centric-mindset, is a better thing for the ecosystem/industry.
But in a way it’s terrible. I mainly blame one my heroes, Ben Horowitz, for this problem. I want to explore this in detail.
I believe, there are two core skills needed for any industry/company to make money: building things and selling things.
Yes. It may sound dumb, but it is that simple.
I started my career as a programmer, and I took pride in building things. My love for computers started from school, and I spent 15 years of my life in learning languages, technologies and architecture frameworks to build and ship things. Like many in my programming clan, I used to look down on marketing and sales folks. I thought the programmers were the centre of the universe and every other function was merely benefitting from the tech folks.
I came out of that bubble after my stint as an accidental product manager. I understood my blindspots and why my worldview of an ego-centric tech person was wrong. It was almost ten years ago when I got an opportunity to be a product manager. I didn’t have any books/articles/blogs on what product management was, what they do and how it is done in different companies.
It was during that time I came across this article, Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager, by Ben Horowitz, who had codified this based on his stints as a product person.
I was MINDBLOWN after reading this, and it was my bible for some years. Which I think was one of my biggest mistakes.
Ben Horowitz’s writing was a seminal piece in inspiring people about being a great product manager. Till date, it is one of the best blogs about product management, where reams and reams are still written on this.
In that, Ben writes this:
A good product manager is the CEO of the product. A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves in terms of the success of the product.
IMO, this analogy of a PM being a CEO has been received in a different light by many people.
Many people think PM is a person like Jobs or Musk like a cult leader. But in reality, PMs are people with very less number of people reporting to them (Group PMs and VP of Products are a little different), and they need to influence without authority.
John Cutler, one of the excellent writers about Product Management, says this:
The more you get into the business of … resource-juggling, herding, acting as a facilitator, or “managing” the more you’ll start wearing the wrong set of hats. Your team will start relying on you for something that they can, in most cases, do for themselves.
Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom also shares this point of view:
I think articles talking about them being mini-CEOs have over-glamorized the role a little. People think product management is shit like you see in A Beautiful Mind, where they’re staring into a park and writing some breakthrough thoughts on a window. Or that they possess a Steve Jobs-esque type of product intuition, where decisions come easy, and influence comes for free. None of this is true.