Kristen Burroughs

What is product management? (a memo) Product management is the art, science, and practice of making products successful. You can begin evaluating product success via the product’s User adoption, Customer satisfaction, and Business impact. Consistent product success only comes from unique customer & market insights, creative product solutions, and disciplined execution across the various functions & teams involved in building & distributing the product. Anybody who has these abilities (or has the capacity & desire to develop them) can do product management. You do not need a specific job title to do product management. In technology product companies, one or more of the founders initially perform the product management role. As the company grows, product management usually morphs into a specialized role because the depth & complexity of each aspect of the role (i.e. insight, solution, execution) grows. When that happens, the person doing the role typically gets the title of Product Manager. Product management is a team sport, by definition. This means that The Product is not just the Product Manager’s concern. It is everyone’s concern: the designer’s, the engineer’s, the data scientist’s, the researcher’s, the marketer’s and so on. An effective Product Manager orchestrates opinions, priorities, and actions across the org while bringing his/her own unique insights and creativity to the mix. A good PM strikes a balance here, just like a good tour guide: when you are visiting a new country, you don’t want your tour guide to order you around & be bossy—but you also do not want your tour guide to simply follow you around without offering any interesting context or observations. Product Manager is the most generalist role on a product team. A Product Manager must play to the strengths of his/her team and fill gaps where needed. This means that Product Managers’ work will look very different across companies, and even different across different teams within the same company. Due to the inherently ambiguous & cross-functional nature of the role, Product Managers constantly have to build entirely new skills and adapt their traits to be most effective in new environments. That said, the fundamental skills & traits don’t vary all that much. 3 fundamental skills of effective Product Managers are: - Critical thinking - Cognitive empathy - Influential communication 3 fundamental traits are: - Curiosity - Deep care - High agency Because product management requires you to “work through others”, Product Managers are rarely in full control of their inputs, outputs, and outcomes. This makes the PM role fairly stressful. Because it is a leadership role, product management comes with major responsibility, but also gives you high leverage from your time. Product management is not for everyone, but it can be a very fulfilling role & career for people who like solving business & customer problems via products and genuinely enjoy working with other people. And implemented right, it can also be quite impactful for companies.

Any designers out there still drawing rectangles and using them for alignment and spacers in their work?