product manager

“The best product managers do a good job for their cross-functional teams of leading them by defining what game they're playing. And then second, how do you keep score?”

“I remember at Google, when we were interviewing product managers, we would take these packets and we would have all these different, we were doing structured interviews at the time. It was on a four point O scale. You need to score above a 3.5.”

“And one piece that I'd like to add to that list is, is portfolio theory. So I think every product manager should have some sense of the portfolio of products they want to build and really apply an investor's mindset to making those decisions.”

“Personally, I hate putting people on the spot with a really hard task because as a PM, you don't need to be like on the spot solving really hard problems. You have time to think. And process and research.”

“My first piece of advice always is you should wait longer than you think you need to.”

“One mistake that PMs often make is jumping to a solution. When someone asks them, how would you approach this? It's just like, here's the answer, versus asking questions to better understand Context and the space and understand things that the person maybe has…”

“My feeling is, if you don't like PMs, you've worked with a bad PM, because PMs should make everything better, should make you happier, should make you more efficient, should let you do better work.”

“Basically, your job as a PM is to shape the product, to ship the product, and to synchronize the people, and all of that in order to drive impact for the business.”

“The fastest way to lose credibility with the team, with the engineering team, as a product manager, is suggesting something that sounds simple, but that takes three years.”

“Well, I think one signal is if the team is constantly reacting to what the product needs. Like if you're constantly underwater and the things you end up prioritizing are the things that you learn really late are broken. And you're not feeling like you can be p…”

“And your job as a team and as a product manager is to take all that input in. And make organization and prioritization out of chaos. You cannot react to all the things you should not react to all the things. And you should have a well-tuned barometer about kno…”

“The job of a PM, great PMs crystallize problems and then present them to their engineers and their engineers are like, oh yeah, we believe in this problem. Here's how we think about this problem. And we will go and figure out how we build that solution, right?…”

“I think at some point you can see growth being much more decentralized into just how PMs create the product itself. We build in mechanisms to promote the product through virality or these other things. We build onboarding flows. We build upgrade flows to get p…”

“Some of the salespeople, some sales, you know, leaders and CMOs have lots of product expertise. You have to remember, they're close to the customer. They've explained to the customer what the product does. They, you know, in their previous jobs have learned wh…”

“In my experience, most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain really at all. Like you talked to some of them. In fact, I would say, I would probably go so far as to say …”

“I think the product manager role as defined by the world is way too pigeonholed. I think we should broaden the responsibilities of the PM role. I think they should be much more responsible for design, much more responsible for engineering, for analytics. Like,…”

“Listen to their behaviors, ignore most of their opinions.”

“So it's this it's a sudden push for maturity that a lot of product managers fail to have. They want to stay in their box, you know, working with design and engineering and not caring as much about the rest of the business as they need to, or otherwise they can…”

“I think product words begin to break when the product manager job starts to morph into more of a general manager, you know, a GM job, you know, when, you know, companies, companies grow and product teams are forced to scale with that growth you know, product m…”

“Once you make it through to like certain organizations and you are in this PM role, you do have more of like a political job than you do a breaking glass job.”

“I've never seen a product come from a product manager. I've only seen great products come from product teams.”

“Pre-product markets sit, founders usually doing most of the product management, working directly with the engineers, getting things built. So then usually, you know, you find product market fit and maybe you bring on your first product manager or your first, y…”

“Most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say, on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain. I would probably go so far as to say that it's anti-correlated with the top performers.”

“And what is really important is to have a hypothesis, to be really clear on your hypothesis, not to go in with a vague set of, I want to ask you about this general area of your life, but to have a couple of sharp hypotheses you're out to test, but to be entire…”

“In those roles, you kind of learn a level of scrappiness, you learn customer empathy, you learn humility that sets you up for success in a bunch of ways that like, you know, the traditional kind of PM that has started right out of college doesn't necessarily h…”

“And like, you know, we talked to like some you know, potential product managers early on and they all say the same thing. Oh yeah. Pick your verticals, narrow it down to me, to make it usable. And like, no, we're not going to hire these people. That's like the…”

“For the most part, no. There may be a few types of products that you might get by, but I like deep technical PMs.”

“I like to think analysts make incredible product managers largely because you're forced to think broadly about the business, really dive deep into data, both quantitative and qualitative and the signals that you can gather to really inform strategy.”

“It's finding a way to make baby steps towards the vision while staying alive, basically.”

“But if you can live as a sales engineer or an engineer without doing that, if you can take the spec and build it without fighting, you can never be a, so if you cannot not product manage, then you should be a product manager.”

“If you're rocking it as a product manager, everybody thinks you suck. If sales loves you, engineering hates you. Because you're chasing deals and you're not thinking about the long-term future. If engineering loves you, sales hates you, because you're just doi…”

“On average, yes.”

“I've known a lot of product managers That ship a product and don't observe how it's behaving in the wild through data. I think they're fucking insane. Like, you spent all this energy and willpower creating this thing, and you're not obsessively watching exactl…”

“I think a lot of product managers get too distracted watching the competition. And they don't have a vision for their own product.”

“I think oftentimes PM are enamored with their solution and they're not actually good at defining the hypothesis that led them to that solution. And they just ship this product and the product doesn't work. And then they have to go back and say, like, why didn'…”

“Oftentimes like product managers, they have an idea and they ask the question to validate their idea and it's actually the wrong idea.”

“The founder or the first product manager should be selling the first hundred customers.”

“I've worked with so many companies where the product managers don't really know the user as much. Marketing has to know the user because they are in events. They are in trade shows. They are online. And they need to send that information back to products and t…”

“Most of them haven't been a product manager. They have no idea what this role is about. So they don't know what to look for. They don't know how to grade it. And so they go off of pedigree. Oh, they were at Google or B they know the lingo, you know, they talke…”

“And when you get to maybe, maybe when it's still three PMs, there's still not a big need for big structure process, but when you get up to 10 plus, You're only as good as sort of the average PM's performance. And if you don't think about the broader system tha…”

“There are fewer engineers, fewer PMs, fewer designers. People are being asked to do more with less. I would guess the average PM probably has less time to get out of the building. And there's more focus on revenue. And if you're a product manager and you're tr…”

“And I think if you hand it off before then, it can be very problematic because it's these decisions, which ICP, what are we going to prioritize to build for them? What's the core user experience? These things are so central to a company, especially if it's a P…”

“If you want to be a badass PM, I don't think you really need it. You can learn the skills that you need to learn through product-focused training, through being in the right situation, through learning from Jedi Masters at your company. If you want to be a CPO…”

“Five interviews total. First one's a 30 minute recruiter screen or hiring manager screen if you don't have a recruiter. Just checking for the basics. Then the hiring manager should spend an hour with them checking on sort of the clear the bar for the core comp…”

“There's four buckets for an individual PM. One is around valid. I call it validation. Customer interviewing, product usage data, kind of like gathering insights. Two is build, which is how well do you work with engineering? How can you make trade-offs? Can you…”

“Now, to do that well, you need about half your time to be out of the building. Most PMs spend about 95% of their time facing engineering. And zero to fives talking to customers and being out in the world.”

“Most of these issue tracking tools go for PMs first. Right. It's like, you're the manager, you're the planner, you're planning the development, the roadmap, the cycle, all this kind of stuff. That's the target customer. And the fact that they kind of flipped t…”

“I think the best PMs actually have done some stint in gaming, right?”

“And I think that really great product people, they like sweat every word because they realize that like communication is so much of the job and what you say and the words you pick matter.”

“Early in your career, you don't have a ton of tools in your toolkit. Most PMs are typically really great at one thing, something like execution or something like writing a doc. And I think people expand their toolkit over time.”

“I'm not saying all PMs need to write code, but all PMs need to understand how code is written.”

“I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers. If possible, one of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional.”

“If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A-B test. You should be able to know what is the right product.”

“Some PMs are quite technical, and they're close to the software. I think those roles will definitely merge.”

“I do not think that to sell twice as many cars, we need twice as many product managers or twice as many software developers. We should be expecting incredible leverage over our fixed expense base in those areas and expecting those people to cover more ground o…”

“We have a number of product managers in our organization that were customer advocates. They were on the phones listening to customers and dealing with customers all day, every day. We have ones that were loan underwriters. We have ones that did home delivery o…”

“I don't. I think that being the PM, you need to be obsessed with every aspect of the experience, and I think that you need to really intimately understand the system. And what I mean by that is that any good experience has so many inputs and so many outputs, A…”

“I think what changes is your ability to communicate those ideas, your ability to do more upfront, your ability to do better user research because you can show prototypes easier. So I think the tool chest gets bigger, but the core skillset of like, Actually fig…”

“Your product managers are probably going to have to be domain experts, like people who sort of deeply understand something like medicine or, you know, drug discovery or early round venture investing, or, you know, like, you know, just sort of pick your thing.”

“The framing that you should probably have is you're not glue, you're WD-forty.”

“PMs have a main character syndrome sometimes that they have to be the CEO of the product, be this face of the product.”

“Smaller companies shouldn't have PMs because the founder is playing that role.”

“But as we started building other products, we realized, and other audiences, they're like, oh no, people are confused by a two D canvas. They would prefer to be in more of a workflow where they can see one thing at a time. And so as we contemplated other Types…”

“I think the expectation for PMs is not going to be down the line. It's not going to be, I tell someone to go and build something. It's going to be, you should go out and build it too, right?”

“Product managers are sometimes viewed as these like, I'm the mini CEO. I decide strategy and then people execute. That is like the worst definition of a product manager that I've ever heard.”

“I think what is likely to happen is there is clear work definitions of what an engineer does today, what a product manager does, and what a designer does. I think these are going to converge way more than what's happening today in technology organizations.”

“Honestly, now, probably in 12 to 24 months, the job of a PM will look entirely different. So I think we're talking about five years because that feels safe, but honestly, my guess now, or what I've changed my mind on is, it's going to be in two years, is my gu…”

“If you know how to play chess and play guitar, your will be a great PM because it's the creative side together with analytical side. Chess is a great proxy for analytical capability and playing instruments is an amazing proxy. For creativity.”

“No, I don't think so. I think all the teams become smaller and more productive and more cross-functional.”

“So I, I've worked with, like, a hundred PMs probably over the course of my career. I like his 15 to 20 hours more than most of their, like, 50 to 60 hours.”

“Even just the idea of like CEO of the product, I think is really obnoxious and not helpful.”

“I don't like the thing like PMs are the CEOs of their teams because I think PMs serve the context they're in and their job is to keep a team aligned to the direction of the company.”

“I also don't think you will need a designer for all things. Like so much of this is going to just come from vibe coding and vibe designing. I think many of the surfaces that you have a designer's waste their time on today can be done just as well by a product …”

“PEMs can prototype super, super fast. Which is really, really great because that means you can front load a lot of the work. So like a PM can start hyper long before once he or she has the, you know, smallest inkling of an idea that we might want to do this. T…”