product manager

“As a product leader, if I'm erring on the side of like, which side of the spectrum I want people from, I generally will take people who are good at execution over people who are good at generating ideas.”

“That means when you try to become a product leader at the company and, you know, the CEO expects that from you and you can't do it. You're gonna like set yourself up to like really cap hard on, on how fast your career can grow and you'll get stuck, you know, w…”

“Product managers, product leaders, maybe more so because the role is so cross-functional and ill-defined, and there's always going to be an edge of the job that you aren't as qualified as whoever you're interacting with. It's sort of the nature of it. Like we'…”

“I actually feel like maybe the pendulum swifted way too far now, where it's like the interview process is so structured. You know, everyone's doing all these mock, they know exactly what questions they're going to get. And it's SAT prep, right? Everyone's like…”

“If the product manager and the designer are not available to be there during your product, their products test, cancel the test. They need to be there.”

“There's a, you know, if you're not working every day with a set of engineers on solving problems, you are not a product manager.”

“Any of your favorite products or companies, it's a very different animal. You know, you've got, you've really got true peers. They're not there to, the developers aren't there to just implement your dumb ideas. They are there to help you come up with a great s…”

“I hate the idea of those companies that have separate product owners because product owner is just an administrative role. Product owners almost never have the skills to be a product manager.”

“In a feature team, the product manager is basically there to herd the cats to get it now. And that's non-trivial, but they need to get stuff organized. They need to get stuff gathered. These requirements, you need to document them in whatever tool you're using…”

“That is the single biggest area empowered teams fall down. The product manager is ill-equipped or a nice way of saying incompetent.”

“I really do believe at this point in time that, that feature teams and real product teams should not use the same string product manager. The job is so radically different that it just is, it's misleading to call them both product manager.”

“While the engineers definitely own feasible and the designer definitely owns usable, valuable and viable, which are two of the hardest things to do, that's the product manager.”

“You as a PM perhaps are fixated as you are dealing with this launch or this project, you are fixated on the execution level, which is what does it take to get something done? And how can I do it? How can I hit the next milestone? Those are all the things we ar…”

“PMs implicitly just deep down, they know what their L tasks are because those are the tasks that are bothering them the most because they are not doing them or because they're not doing them as well as they know they should.”

“As a product manager or as anybody in a creative, high impact, high leverage role, all your tasks are not created equal. There are actually three types of tasks that you end up doing in such a role. So there are L tasks, which are leverage tasks and the L task…”

“So I ask them to teach me something new in one minute. And so I'll usually like, I'll pull up my phone and I'll like start the timer. I'll give them a second to think about it and start the timer. And they're graded on three different criteria. So one is compl…”

“The product experiments and the product tasks, that's a person with a product skill set because they know how to work with other PMs. They know how to work with engineers and marketers don't.”

“And I see analogies of the product manager is the decider and they're the CEO of the product. I think this is coming from toxic business culture personally.”

“You should be able to do is point at how many experiments you ran the previous quarter and what numbers moved in the right direction. You should be accountable for your experiments and how you're spending the money and what you're doing, but you shouldn't be a…”

“And so I think for PMs, it's It was so easy to get sucked into like the press and it's like, yo, plan the work worth the plan. Go back to your job. That's what you're supposed to do. Solve for customers in the middle of this, and then you figure out how to com…”

“When you are working on algorithmic heavy products, your job is figuring out what the algorithm should be responsible for, what people are responsible for, and the framework for making decisions.”

“The reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long-term effects often. Nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product.”

“I've had this come up a few times when I've interviewed product folks that they'll speak down on their counterparts or say that, you know, the reason they weren't able to meet deadlines or push product in the right way was because of The engineering team or be…”

“I think breadth is incredibly important. It's so critical, especially if someone has an end goal of wanting to step into a product leadership role to have been able to have touched lots of different components as opposed to specializing in one specific thing.”

“There's a metaphor I like to use when I give PMs advice on where to work within a company, which is there's like the eye of Sauron, which is the number one most important thing to the CEO at that time. And my advice is often don't avoid that thing usually, but…”

“And it just means, you know, you don't own marketing or you don't own this other function, but you own it until you find somebody else to own it. And so that's not necessarily thinking big in terms of scale or whatever, but in terms of how you think about your…”

“You know, what separates product managers from consultants sometimes is you forecast and then you execute, and then you measure and validate, and that helps you build your instincts.”

“Given the same amount of skill, intelligence, and resources, a product manager with a great Innate ability to prioritize is going to generate five X the impact of someone without that skill.”

“You know, trust is just built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations. And I think that's a good kind of mantra to think about as a PM, like, you know, my meeting, the expectations that I set and not just doing good things, but like calling your shots, …”

“If you just think answer and then explain, or sometimes answer and then shut up, that actually is a tactical thing you can do to get better at communicating.”

“We don't need to create this complicated story for the next sprint. I'd say that it's, that's too much of an effort, maybe a waste of time. Usually you need to look a bit further out to make it worse. Spending a lot of time on creating your story.”

“Consistency beats intensity. So really the smaller time investments on a weekly basis, and that applies for The PM's time investment is learning new things, and it applies to the product leads investment and helping their people to grow.”

“As the line manager has no clue about the product community out there and the craft of product management, they often struggle to point them in the right direction to say like, Hey, I think that's a problem somebody else already had. So maybe you could watch a…”

“People tend to talk about T-shaped employee profiles. But T-shaped is so not enough for a product person, right? We want them to understand underlying problems of the business and the users, finding solution for those, getting things out of the door with the t…”

“So it really focuses on Incremental improvements, not crazy stressing everybody out improvements, not what it, what could I do to make it a 10. It's more really how could I improve your situation, really build rapport, really be there for your product folks.”

“At least with a lot of clients that I'm working with, they are not trained product people. So they often come from a marketing background or a business background or from the data background, so to say, or the engineering background, but they often never have …”

“You know, I hate the idea of those companies that have separate product owners because product owner is just an administrative role. Product owners almost never have the skills to be a product manager.”

“That is the single biggest area empowered teams fall down. The product manager is ill-equipped or a nice way of saying incompetent.”

“As a product manager or as anybody in a creative, high impact, high leverage role, all your tasks are not created equal. There are actually three types of tasks that you end up doing in such a role. So there are L tasks, which are leverage tasks and the L task…”

“The other skill that I'll also call out, which nobody talks about for some reason is interview skills, you know, because so much Of what gives you a chance to become better as a PM is working at a great company. And how do you get that job beyond networking is…”

“Number one, it's much harder to learn these skills than the IQ stuff. The IQ stuff is very intellectual. Sometimes you just need a mental model, practice a bit. The EQ, I'm still learning these things. It's just like every year I'm trying to get better. And th…”

“It's harder to get feedback on the EQ stuff. And that's also why it's harder to develop and why a lot of people like reach like terminal levels in product because people are like, oh, they like emotional intelligence. And they say that in calibration rooms, Bu…”

“As a PM, you're kind of in the center, facilitating all these different trade-offs. And when you go into design, you kind of have to ignore some of those other aspects to really be insistent on pushing on the best experience possible. Like, just kind of suspen…”

“If you ask an engineer about how much time it'll cost to go and build something, and it's something that they came up with, or they're advocating for, it's almost always half the time as something that, like, you are asking for as a PM, right?”

“I would say managing designers is harder than managing product managers.”

“There are certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memified to the point where, like, someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting, and you know that you've really done your job as maybe a researcher o…”

“The company mission, the company strategy, the product strategy, the product roadmap, and the product goals, all work together as a system where if a PM is looking to define strategy, they can work top to bottom. And if they're looking to debug strategy, they …”

“More often than not, when I talked to teams and helped to debug that issue, What it came down to was that there wasn't a deep enough understanding of what the strategy is. So what is the framework that should actually inform that prioritization? And so oftenti…”

“If we're going to fix this thing, we can't just have the marketing department or just the product managers sit down and cook up new positioning and then heave it over the wall to everybody else. It actually needs to be a group effort. It's a team sport. So if …”

“I think actually both in the Stripe case and the Retool case, the thing that both of these companies have in common is you're building for developers. The people who are building the product are the customers in a lot of ways. So like they get it, you know, th…”

“The moment at which it became clear, like we really do need PMs at Stripe. And I think we felt the same way at Retool is your customer base starts expanding. You start having different kinds of customers. You need to understand Sort of the whole market, all of…”

“Usually product managers get ahead The more they launch. But if you're in a research org, you're not going to launch as often. So you need to make sure to clarify with the hiring managers early on. Hey, what does progress mean? How am I going to get assessed i…”

“I believe that all product managers will be AI product managers in the future.”

“I encourage people to just take an online course, understand more, get your hands dirty, pair up with someone else that's in the same boat as you, because this is going to give you the skillset to understand how that tool that's going to help you in your day-t…”

“The people who are standing up the product ops orgs and being the first prod ops hire, the kind of like leadership level, Our former product people, and I strongly advocate for product ops leaders to have done that role, to have actually had hands-on product e…”

“I can count on one hand the companies who have blocked their product managers from speaking to customers. And those companies are not product companies. I mean, they do not believe in product management. They might say they do, but they don't.”

“I personally believe there's this natural evolution That happens at any mature function when it starts to grow in an industry and across an organization. So think about marketing or sales, right? This just started to happen with product managers.”

“Are you holding them accountable to truly understanding the customer in, in whatever way possible, especially going out and talking to the customer. Please don't have anybody ever take that right. And really spending time with their engineers and the customers…”

“We hear a lot about having the skills to thrive in ambiguity in order to be a successful product manager, but to be a successful product manager in news, you have to be able to thrive in chaos.”

“So some of the kind of best PMs that I've brought over to product from kind of other functions, they really start by expressing interest in product and then like start partnering closely with the product manager and maybe even doing a little bit of product wor…”

“I mean, it's good that they take a lot from UX, and it is important to be people-centered, but the reality is the product manager serves the business. That's their role.”

“I think it will almost definitely happen with us. And again, this goes back to the assume you don't know.”

“We don't have PMs at the company. I'm my, you know, my title at Facebook was product manager. I love product management, but we view it not as a team. We view it as a leader, a role on a project, on an effort. And depending on the projects, different types of …”

“I feel like the whole thing's gotten so performative. It's like interviewing is handing out Oscars based on who's prepared the best. Tell me about a time response versus actually assessing like who can do the job we're hiring for. So it's like most PMs are bet…”

“I forced, I added basically a section in the doc, in the ticket stack, ask the PMs to write the success metric ahead of time, as well as adding which of the growth lever this is helping. Is this contributing to acquisition, activation, retention, monetization?…”

“So I think like 10, 12 years ago, everyone expected that they would have scrum masters and scrum masters have like largely in many companies just kind of disappeared. But then you think, well, where did that responsibility go? Because someone has to do Project…”

“But I think product managers, like I consider product to be the ones that really need to drive urgency.”

“If you're not doing enough of that, then I think you might not be listening well. Or you might not be picking on sort of the cues. Then you're just, if there's no conflict, if there's no contention, Then something is missing.”

“The best PMs for developer focused products, I think are usually very technical. They're mostly former engineers themselves, or maybe kind of current engineers still tinkering on the side, but bringing, you know, a lot of user insight and strategy to the probl…”

“One is they want to build something that they, as much as possible are world-class in. So if you think about the different types of product ambiguities that exist in, in industry, you can be a great crafter. You know, you could be incredibly strong at market a…”

“And then maybe goal number two is having a story to tell to that next employer and that next, next. You know, what I worry about is sometimes when I'm in an interview, and you and I have probably done hundreds, and you're talking to someone, and then they talk…”

“And then for whatever reason in product managers, maybe because there were managers in our title, we just all became managers. Like what about the product? What about the other side? So I actually think it's a bug that has existed for a long time that actually…”

“You don't need to ask for a promotion. Your outcomes should speak for themselves, and yes, you should have sponsors and people who advocate for you, But a lot of that just comes from that, like, raw connection to the work and to your team.”

“And we don't look at the functional data as much, but as you can the PM data seems to be trending just slightly, even maybe below software engineers and that as well, which is maybe a comp for this.”

“I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the center of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges. Like there's a, you know, there's always someone who's like this exceptional data science and the ability to maybe be a great GM and lead inspire, or maybe s…”

“We should find out who wrote that expression early on of, like, PMs should be mini CEOs. I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever in the history of product management, because I think that is how you wind up having PMs who try to act like dictato…”

“Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long-term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to. But on top of that, they can do whatever the hell they want. And if they're taking on something that puts the things that they committe…”

“And look like there, there's drawbacks to that culture, right? Where you get to like a radically empowered engineering team that thinks that they know the product better than the designer or the PM and they push back on the designs or they disagree with the PM…”

“So you absorb a bunch of context around how pieces of the business are connected and you can start to Really widen your aperture in terms of the size of opportunities that might be in front of you that maybe you would have missed if you would have been so head…”

“I think really the way to think about marketing technology is it's a product manager whose specific role and focus is the system or the third party or first party platform, because, you know, marketing technology can mean a collection of third party tools, whi…”

“So again, there weren't product managers. The closest thing would have been TPNs, technical program managers, who kind of helped manage the sprints. And manage to schedule and listing out what features would be, would happen.”

“Generally we don't subscribe to this idea of PM as the mini CEO. You know, you're up there directing from on high that we're gonna build that feature and we're gonna do that. And that's just not, not the type of culture that we have. And generally speaking fro…”

“Who Nick, our CPO likes to say, you don't have to have the best ideas, but you have to choose the best ideas. And so really figuring out how you're selecting what you're going to build and then living with the consequences.”

“One of the things that I believe has, you know, a necessary part of building a high functioning Organization is that one, you know, building together is important. So like having engineers and product managers and designers be together, have shared goals and a…”

“I think all product people, whether you're a designer, product manager, people in research, data science, need to think about the story all the time. Work with marketing, work with product marketing, and like, learn about how to explain the product as much as …”

“A phrase, actually, we were talking about David Cancel before we started carrying the water, and this was a big theme when I joined Drift, and this is about how you can't be a good PM if you're not willing to do the hard, boring, unglamorous work of customer s…”

“First, I think the best PMs are really good at breaking things down and simplifying things. So finding at any moment, like what is the really, truly the only thing you need to do, especially in a big company There are eight million priorities. There's 700 OKRs…”

“I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it enough time, like, and it, and it's not only that you've done it, but that you can admit it, and you know which on…”

“And strategy to me, and hopefully we'll talk about strategy in a bit, it's one tiny slice. You do a strategy, but it's five percent of the work that you do. Yes, it's important because you want to get your strategy right and you need to pick the right products…”

“My advice is always, if you can get someone to stamp you with the product manager role, take it, because to your point, it's what we screen on. It's for better force. It's just like, you just have to, you have to get that first job. And then once you get that …”

“I don't, I'm not going to pretend like if you're just great at your job quietly that you're going to get what you want, right? You're not just, if you're toiling in the background, doing a great job, getting results, if you have a great manager, maybe you'll b…”

“Another thing I hear, especially as you get further in your career, and unfortunately, if you're maybe an underrepresented person in tech, is that you need to be more strategic, and so that's feedback that almost always happens, especially if you're a woman in…”

“I got to see two or three cycles of the same product, and that, I learned more from that than I did out of the, you know, year or so I spent doing other things each at a time, because you got to see the consequences of your decisions, and that's rare, and peop…”

“Most PMs, most jobs, most products, you're gonna be better off talking to 10 users, and you'll get more and better insights out of why things are happening than you would with any dashboard link.”

“What we did is we combined what one might call the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing.”

“Product operations does not take away decision making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them.”

“And I think for product managers, you still need to be super comfortable with data. Like if you can't read these charts, if you can't see, understand trends, if, you know, and a lot of times too, if you're putting this stuff in Looker or, you know, a BI tool, …”

“I don't have a hard and fast rule on that one, but I would say like if you're at a one-to-one ratio, like you're doing it wrong.”

“You should never be like outsourcing your decision making to a product ops person. That's not the point. Like they're the product manager for the product managers. That's how I think about it, right? So their decisions should be around how do I operationalize …”

“I, you know, I saw with my MBA students at Harvard too, we do a whole class They play a product manager. I had a lot of people opt out of being a product manager at the end of it. They were like, I did not realize it was like that, right? Like I did not realiz…”

“In my role on the operating side and managing teams and Melissa as well, more and more product managers are taking on the data harvesting, the data implementation, and, you know, just to get data to work with, they're spending, you know, 20, 30% of their time.”

“No matter how boring it sounds on the surface, like, I think a really great product manager kind of, like, cast something as like, well, this is why it's so existential to us, and this is why it's so interesting, and like, really rallying the truth.”

“Good answers are people who put structure and a way forward through the ambiguity. Like that's what you look for. Like you want your PM to not just be like, oh no, we're swimming in ambiguity, but like actually put A path forward.”

“If you have conviction and it's not clear, then you don't have conviction. Quite frankly, if you're like, I kind of think, you know, maybe we should, you know, they're like five things we should solve. I'm like, then you don't have conviction.”

“One of the most powerful skills Of a product manager storytelling, right? Because you look at generation after generation after generation, what people pass on is stories. They're not numbers. They're not stats. It's stories. And actually when you blend storie…”

“You absolutely need to have one to start by saying that regardless of what level you are in the company. So if people say, oh, I'm just a junior pian or, you know, Whatever level there is some micro macro vision that you need to have”

“Do you know your engineering manager's birthday? It's the day they showed up in the world. It's the most important day for them. It's the day they showed up in the world in the world. Do you know their birthday? Do you know their work anniversary? Do you know …”

“At least I have realized that apart from what product managers can do, almost 70, 80% of problems, why things don't happen, are a setup issue. Product leaders or other leaders have not thought through what OKRs are doing to my company. They have not really ful…”

“So I don't think it's a tactical prioritization product manager call. It really is a product strategy call, and the conversation that needs to happen Is between say the head of product and the CEO or even like the leadership. If I gave you a hundred focus poin…”

“One of the reasons why I really feel product managers must, if not better, but equally understand category consumers, which are not in market or which are not really looking or which are not buying your products just yet, as good as the marketer or the brand e…”

“So in my opinion, the full stack product managers are the ones who are going to be more successful rather than product managers who are doing very good at one particular area only.”

“Most product managers should not even be product managers. They should think a little bit more around whether this is actually the right field for them, because I think a lot of people from other areas have entered the field without fully realizing what it tak…”

“A question I ask in every product interview is what's the worst product you've ever shipped? And that's because I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. Like, you just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it en…”

“Doing product management is a product manager's job, but getting better at product management. It's the manager's job. It's the coach's job.”

“In the absence, Of getting good coaching, you need to find practice arenas... I always advise product managers like, you need to join a lot of pick up games. Which are kind of you know, there are low barriers to entry, low evaluation, low risk type of thing. G…”

“I think most people don't like product managers often because they haven't experienced good product managers.”

“Doing product walkthroughs to identify lists of potential issues is a great thing to do. Prioritizing that list. Figuring out which ones are more or less a problem and for whom is an area where you should be extremely wary of relying on your own sort of opinio…”

“AB tests are great, but one of my most painful things to do is to sit in a room full of PMs and data scientists who have just seen the results of an experiment that like flipped to Statsig. And then they're like, cool. I was significantly down over this course…”

“The average PM who lives in that land all day, every day. And what they do is not in the Venn. You know, I think those are people who are also like Performing customer centricity and performing user centeredness a lot when they're really not interested.”

“There's a lot of teams that are like, we don't want new PMs. We don't need product managers. They just get in the way. And I find that that's only the case when the product manager is not great and not really good at their job because most great PMs just make …”

“Every time a PM comes to a researcher at the end of a product process and says, can you just run a quick user study, you know, just to validate our assumptions. That's user centered performance. It's too late to matter. That PM is not interested in being wrong…”

“Most researchers that I know are working on teams where they're like, I'm the only researcher. And there's like, I have seven PMs and 20 designers and like I'm trying to do 10 projects and no one's going to do a good job that way. So researchers have to learn …”

“You know, as PMs, we need time for creative work. We need that deep work time, and that doesn't happen when you've got all of these meetings with 30 minutes in between each of them. You need sort of, you know, three to four hours to get that going, to get into…”

“The truth is they don't need PMs in a feature team. They don't because it's a project management role and he, and they already have plenty of people who can cover that. And furthermore, a lot of times the engineers or the designers say, you know, we'd rather d…”

“It's only when you sign up for an outcome that you have the needs for a product manager in the sense that I would say in the Silicon Valley sense, that's when you need a product manager, because if you've been asked to solve these problems, that means you have…”

“On a real empowered product team. Product manager is a creator, not a facilitator.”

“So these certifications, which in my opinion are bogus, but most people don't know.”

“Are the ratios between PMs and other teams going to shift over time? Yes. Are the skills required going to shift? Yes. Could they shift much faster than we all anticipate? Probably.”

“I think so many PMs come in with a point of view of like the product and the target market, but like don't actually understand the underlying mechanisms of how we make money and what our unit economics are and how that could be improved. And the candidates tha…”

“I think there's this real identity shift that's going to happen where PMs think that their value is Is coming from their, you know, ideas that they manifest into the world and how they individually manifest them. And I think we're gonna shift to like, are you …”

“How do you pitch this product, which I feel like is a thing product managers miss a lot, which like how to position and pitch it.”

“If you're in an all remote world, your requirements have to be clear. You know, sometimes you can get away with, Hey, this, I have a daily stand up or a couple of weeks stand up. And then you use that as the opportunity to clarify something. You have to get it…”

“You know, the way I tell people who are new in their career, maybe they're now an associate or intermediate PM at lab or other places I've worked that like, if everyone's really annoyed at you, you're probably actually doing your job well.”

“And so I think that, you know, based on how you fell into it, you might have different spikes and different strengths and leaning into those is really important. For the other things, it's also, of course, important to have like a sort of growth mindset and to…”

“Some product managers, what they bring to the table is arguments, what they bring to the table are debates, what they bring to the table are pushbacks, while others Are able to channelize the questions, channelize the inputs, channelize the direction, and conv…”

“Finally, we have what's your operating model, which I feel is the most important thing which you have to have to focus if you are going from mid-senior to senior level. This is essentially about communication, collaboration, organizational skills, and communit…”

“It's not about you standing alone. It's you always collaborating and pairing with someone else, but you are the only one who's pairing with everyone else, and therefore you have that unique insight which no one else in the team will have.”

“The mistake that I see a lot of product managers make is they start operating in either output or outcomes. And when you are transitioning to outcomes, it's very important that you continue to still hone your craft on outputs.”

“There are three tenets that I define in working well as a product manager with others. Number one is raise difficult issues without being difficult to work with. Bring out important topics without drawing importance to yourself. And finally, you are in charge …”

“The really strong product managers are good at usually two or three, two of the three things. The ones who rise, and when they are rising, they are performing well on all the three axes.”

“You put the coolest product areas, your product area is successful, and that automatically guarantees your growth. It doesn't. You have to also show that, yes, you were a useful contributor to having that particular impact.”

“I don't think, especially when you're starting off, that's a very, very good Think even when you are mid senior, I don't think that's a very, very good thing. You have to have to be able to produce these artifacts, which are product artifacts. Even if there ar…”

“The pressure on the line product manager to scale the product that the entire company, the entire executive team, the entire management chain has been counting on. We're launching this thing. We all wanted to scale. We all are very excited about it. We had the…”

“We've told many of our product managers and designers over the last two years, don't worry about serving a thousand customers, taking three weeks serving a thousand customers, getting a bunch of crosstabs, or even at the end of which it's very hard to read the…”

“When you go into the research with the customer, you don't try to sell them. You try to see if they are experiencing pain points. And it becomes very hard when you're in and they say even something a little bit in the direction of what you hope they would say …”

“But if you genuinely believe it's not yet ready to scale your product, at the end of the day, the big mess is the thing you're still going to own. And we're all going to forget that we told you to scale the thing. We're all going to still blame you at the end …”

“I think one of the most important balances in terms of the asking step is both asking clearly, but asking with great humility. And this actually works whether you're in a position of power or not, because I think a lot of folks will go so far to the end of hum…”

“It wasn't until about year six or seven where we actually had product managers.”

“The reality is operations teams, local teams can iterate faster, can scale talking to customers really much more efficiently have great qualitative insights.”

“We all talk about product sense. It's this, like, super mystical thing that no one knows how to get better at. To me, it's just a fancy way of saying you can make good decisions with insufficient data, and the core of that is decisions, and so PMs need as many…”

“Like, I know PM should settle for looking through bent glass, in my opinion, because whether it's a research report, whether it's something a salesperson is telling you, whether it's market research, don't care. It's been processed by someone, and PMs need dir…”

“As a company gets bigger, as teams get more complex, It's very easy and natural to spend more time on things that are internally focused and not externally focused, and I think we just all have to have, like, hypersensitive antenna to that so that we don't fal…”

“I explicitly do not mean read a bunch of other PM artifacts. Like you're not gonna become a better writer by reading PRDs or, you know, whatever it is. Or support articles. It needs to be Writing that compels”

“And when you're just getting started with a new product, the people that should be doing that are the people who are building it, right? That's an engineer. That's a designer. That's a salesperson or a support person. They're the front line of the smallest loo…”

“And I'm working backwards from the belief that if you can't sell or support your own product, I don't trust you to build the product.”

“I can use my intuition From the hundred interviews I've already done, I don't need to do one more interview, and that is a very tempting lie to tell yourself, because the world is changing, their lives are changing, and you need to constantly be exposed to th…”

“If you are in a situation where the product manager is literally not allowed to talk to a customer, There is something structurally wrong and that needs to be fixed first.”

“PMs should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space, of the problem space. And it's within that eng design, everyone else that you're working with They can go as crazy as they want, push up against the bounds, and it filled the box…”

“So if you're very early in the career, I encourage people to learn the core skills first. You can learn the core skills when there's a lot of stability. This product is growing, you know, X percent, like five percent, and you're going to grow at 10. That's ama…”

“I think perfectionism is a curse we place on ourselves. And it's a very dangerous thing, particularly for product leaders, because product managers, you know, things are gonna go wrong. That's literally part of your job. And yet when we have perfectionism, it …”

“A lot of the greatest PMs are the worst PMs for their careers. They love products. They love the crafts. They love, you know, the customer research, the data, they have plans, they have timelines. And then when it comes to career, they have none of those thing…”

“If you're a product manager on a standalone app inside of a large, like, you should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything, like, and then, yeah, it should be cleaned up, prototyped by a technical designer, but that's your idea, and prod…”

“The functional organization structure of big tech has kind of separated product managers from the product development process in many ways. They're not looking at data because data scientists are doing that. They're just parsing some of the reports that they g…”

“So in the beginning, dial up inquiry. And then once you, the person who you're talking to feels heard and you actually have absorbed information and maybe you changed your mind. Maybe not though. That's when you begin to advocate. So oftentimes you just come i…”

“Don't come in cuz people usually like when they prepare for a meeting, I've seen many PMs do this and you prepare with like, here's my view. And here are the bullets that support my view. And that's the wrong way to approach it. I think what you want to go int…”

“I think it's actually challenging to find product managers who are also really good marketers. And so I think it's actually like a rare skillset and like the art of marketing and the art of talking, like conveying what you're building in the compelling way to …”

“Engineering done successfully really is all about the details. And you don't necessarily have to understand all of those details, but when you act like they don't matter, and you don't care about them, and it's just like, I don't care, just like tell me when y…”

“What I see happen in those cases is that I see engineers start to over-engineer things because engineers Are like, well, I need to take control of something, right? Like I want to have some creative outlet. So I'm going to use my engineering skills in my creat…”

“I actually think product, you need to have a product mindset. And frankly, you need to have product managers to build good platforms, internal platforms. A lot of companies just don't do this. They don't believe that they should waste headcount on product mana…”

“PMs, because they're, they tend to be the front facing person for initiatives, they're Talking to customers, they're talking to the executive team, whatever. Engineers sometimes think that they don't get the credit for their work because the PM sort of takes a…”

“So much of the work in a platform team is not a Is not exactly product work. Like a lot of it's like, you know, scaling or really like deep kind of technical, like I got to figure out how to actually do this technical thing, or I've got to, you know, do this p…”

“The actual details and focus of the product work is just, you can't write a bunch of code or, and, or manage like a big soft software engineering team and be a product manager at the same time. That's actually just asking, I think too much of people to do that…”

“PMs are way easier to manage. PMs are awesome to manage. PMs want to, like, they're just so helpful. They're, like, want to do things. They're good communicators. I love managing PMs. I have to say, I just, like, my experience, engineers are such a pain. They …”

“So if you are being asked questions that you cannot answer because you just don't know, right? Because that's something that involves a level of technical detail that only the engineers have that you just don't have. And you're, you put yourself in this in-bet…”

“I find the best PMs are the ones that talk the least and encourage other people to do the presenting and announcing.”

“Like I just, my experience is there are plenty of engineers who actually think they can be product managers and they don't really understand all of the elements of the product job. That they would need to be successful.”

“I think of SEO as a product. And I think the product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question. Because it's a product question.”

“Like, you realize how not urgently needed the PM role ever is, like, and first of all, over time, people really respect it.”

“And at the same time over the years, I've also noticed that the colleagues that I identify with the most, like the ones where I just feel I most relate to them, many of them have that same pattern where they've gone to, you know, team lead or director and so o…”

“Being a 10 X PM, for example, is becoming more and more table stakes, especially like you mentioned with AI, that's just the tailwind for all of that.”

“You know, product manager role is just one of those roles where you can just keep doing it, you know, for a really long time because it just gets just keeps changing, and you can change industries, right, without having background in it. The situation changes …”

“So if you're a PM who's, who's doing the kind of route work, it's going to take your job away. But if you're a PM who actually is strategic and can pull the pieces together and be creative and think how you do something that it's going to differentiate, becaus…”

“One of the things that I caution product managers about is that you don't want to be too overly reliant on metrics. And you want to also have an intuition. You want product managers who understand intuitively their customers and their product, and sometimes yo…”

“And in five to 10 years, I think the lines between product managers and engineers and designers are going to blur because AI will enable product managers to build prototypes, to build designs, designers to build a pro like Figma already has their Figma AI.”

“I think the PM role Is the best positioned to thrive in a world of AI? Because if you just think about, you have a tool that can just build a thing for you, just like you're staring at this blank thing that can build anything for you, which function would you …”

“I don't think you'll need fewer. I think you'll be able to do more things. So like, think about every company, our head of sales came to me the other day and you need to hire more engineers because we just have so many things we need to build. Like when have y…”

“I think in France, the market is much less liquid. So it's incredibly difficult to change jobs, and it's very expensive to fire someone in France. So it seems to lead to two effects beyond the obvious job security. One is, I think PMs tend to have less autonom…”

“It's not like something you can just schedule 30 minutes for in the middle of your day of packed OKR reviews and run on ones and meetings... Like to me, it's still insane. Like how many product managers, leaders of all kinds, right. Just run the schedule of li…”

“I don't think it's the tools that you need to learn to be successful. I think what you need to learn to be successful is how to take very ambiguous Situations and consistently drive more and more clarity over time.”

“There was a period of time at Facebook where I think We, the PMs really had to prove their value to the engineers and show that we were actually not slowing things down with all this extra process.”

“There are a few thousand PMs at Meta.”

“Your experience and your strategy, remember my minivan story, is becoming a commodity.”

“The product managers are in, in many cases, missing the point. Like my sense is when you talk to a product manager, they're so consumed to the next feature and what to do. And that's the kind of concrete objective thing. I think many of them are doomed because…”

“Yeah, writing evals, I mean, it's, I actually think it's going to become a core skill for PMs.”

“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”

“When people get trained to be a product owner, it's usually a two-day class where they teach them, hey, this is how you break down a backlog. This is how you do stand-ups with your teams. This is how you think about prioritizing work. This is how you manage yo…”

“Nobody was a product manager who went to that meeting, right? Nobody who wrote the Agile Manifesto was actually a product manager.”

“Get rid of these two different titles because it's confusing everybody. I've seen companies... I've seen companies with 47 different titles for product managers.”

“Take Scrum away. You still need product management, right? Like product owner doesn't exist without Scrum. That's not a thing, but you still need product managers. And that's why all product owners should be product managers. They should be fundamentally produ…”

“What's the most dangerous thing in a tech company? A PM without a way to create impact. Oh no, he's toeing the line here. Maybe you know this person. Maybe you've been this person. I certainly have. Where you know you want to do something big, but you're not q…”

“Customer empathy is not high ROI in the short term. It's almost the opposite. How many times have you gone to a user research session and wanted to jump across the table and say, there's a button right there. I built it for you. It's like a punch in the gut. B…”

“I've realized it's exactly the opposite, that you may not need any other function if you have a PM, because if you think about it, what are these AI tools amazing at? They're amazing at building things. You tell them what to build, they build them. The hardest…”

“It's become easier to break into product management to some degree if you can use these tools, and now you have all these tools at your disposal to go build the next prototype. But I think the bar just got higher for product managers within a company and what …”

“I kind of see in the future, you know, in the near future, most PMs are probably going to be one flavor of an AI product manager, either building tools for other PMs or other, other companies that are deploying AI. Maybe you're behind one of, you know, the cut…”

“If you're saying everything, chances are what everyone else is hearing is kind of nothing. And so we think that rather than covering all your bases, what you should actually be coaching PMs to do, Is to make a meme and go internally viral within the company.”

“Instead of always just circling back and following up later, which is probably what a lot of PMs do, tell your PMs that they should be unafraid to at least share their gut. And so often, you know, we live in a world where people don't have the perfect informat…”

“A common tactic that folks employ is to only talk about the really positive things. Only talk about all the reasons that this would be an exciting investment, like this outdoes all the others, and more. But chances are, if you're trying to go ahead and only ta…”

“He'd tell us to fast forward to that day when the experiment is over, when that sprint is done. And he asked what we thought we'd see at that point. And I like that framing a lot because it kind of lowers the stakes. We all know we're guessing, and it created …”

“In a review, all the stakeholders are ultimately human beings who have short attention spans, who get easily distracted, are context switching, and need to be guided along, and who are ultimately emotional creatures who are swayed by how the review makes them …”

“Realistically, when you're a product manager, your job is to say no to 90% of things that get brought your way. And so that kind of makes you the bad person pretty much from the start. And so you're saying no to 90%, so you can say yes to 10%.”

“Data is more like a compass than a GPS. Right? Like if you look at data as a way of like giving you the answer, you're always wrong. You're always wrong or you're slow. Wrong or slow or sometimes both. Because mostly data doesn't give you the answer. It just t…”

“Most of the time people go talk to the people they always talk to and they learn nothing particularly new. They don't synthesize the results that they got from the conversation. They don't seek out the counterfactual. They don't seek out the proof that they're…”

“If you're leaving something on the table, right, in terms of like the kind of impact that you are having at your job, that's probably the thing that you're leaving on the table. You're probably already doing a good job of, you know, collaborating with engineer…”

“For a product like ours, it's hard to be, like have product managers that are not engineers say, oh, this is what we should do now, because The right solution to the problem might be entangled in things that are like technical details, or they might be entangl…”

“How this is going to work, if you fast forward, you know, one, two, five years, whatever, like PMs are, they're going to be writing quote unquote, instead of just writing a Jira ticket and waiting for a developer to do it. The developers are going to be able t…”

“Initially, there were no PMs at all. PMs were introduced with monetization. Once monetization was a big sort of element, that's kind of where PMs came in.”

“I do think PM is a very valuable function, right? I think it may be actually, and you know, maybe I'll get roasted for this, but I think at the end of the day, not hiring PMs at Snap might've been one of those decisions where it actually succeeded despite that…”

“I actually think PMs should own all the way to marketing in a way. And the reason is that if you think about marketing, it's expanding the surface area of the product, right? It's like search marketing is just placing a button to your product in Google. Facebo…”

“And the way to cut down on time, and I think this is a mistake people make a lot of the time, is when time is being pressured downward, a lot of times engineers, PMs, designers, they will cut on quality rather than cutting on scope.”

“Too many PMs causes problems. You know, we'll like fill the world with decks and ideas versus execution. So I think that the, I think it's a good thing when you have a PM that has that is working with maybe slightly too many engineers, because it means that th…”

“One interesting decision that we kind of have for core engineering is that we don't have pure product managers for the core engineering side of the company. And by the way, that's purely because we build for developers and our product is, is built by developer…”

“The big difference, or one big difference I noticed was that they were extremely careful about only making people PMs who had first proven themselves out as forward deployed engineers. You basically could not become a PM any other way.”

“Well, maybe even it's way more important to have this hunger for building things, you know, and having a raw intellect. And we always try to find people with these intrinsic traits rather than, you know, hiring people who are very experienced, but maybe are no…”

“And the other thing that I strongly believe is what makes a great product manager is not the five amazing strategic ideas you had over those three years. It's the thousand micro decisions that you made, not the five macro decisions that you made, but the thous…”

“The thing that I will say about to keep in mind for PMs is there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think i…”

“People need to understand that they're advocating for ideas and not for themselves. And when I talk to a lot of designers, it may be true for PMs. I hear a lot of people say that they're reluctant to post on social media or on LinkedIn or something. Cause like…”

“Well, if you are like really in it just for pure love of the game, like you just love product management, like, why are you building products for people exactly like you who have all your exact same problems, At a company that sells to other companies that doe…”

“As a PM, you might get a chance to do that. I don't know, a couple times a week, maybe, maybe less often than that. And when you have this little tool, you can do it infinity times. You can do it, you know, you can spend an afternoon doing it. And so again, li…”

“A lot of PMs are like, oh my gosh, I'm so busy, I have no time, I'm in meetings all day, but like, that's a little bit self-inflicted, I think. Like, at some point, like, you have to be the one responsible for getting yourself out of the weeds. And it's hard t…”

“And I start with these two in the framework because they're actually really different. Right. When it's like, I have vibe. I feel the vibe. This is better. And the other one's like, no, I don't believe you. We should test this and prove it. And that's like a r…”

“Options and a recommendation is kind of the magic formula. I did when I was working with Mailchimp, we actually did a workshop with all the product managers at the company where we had people like, Role play trying to sell in a single option versus multiple op…”

“In my consulting work, it's more often than not been an engineer who's actually able to get to that specific impact level goal for the team. Sometimes before the product manager does,”

“You know, the thing that surprised me most when I was researching this book is that the commercially minded PMs I interviewed were also the happiest, which I did not expect at all.”

“I think the way I've come to think about it is that the product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO, if that makes sense. So if the product manager takes that on as their sole responsibility and says, I'm the mini CEO, I think about t…”

“PRD writing is insufficient at the moment. You know, sort of like the static way we ask questions about what's in the customer's minds. It's like that stuff happens to be like faster. The cycle time is so fast now. And so PMs need to adapt and that means new t…”

“We have eliminated more roles. For example, we thought we would need a bunch of product managers. It's turned out that actually if you don't have a product manager, I know this might be going against a little bit of the ethos of where, where Leti started, but …”

“We have not yet gotten to the point where like product managers themselves are actually shipping the code into production, but it's dramatically shortened the amount of time it takes to conceive of, especially like a bolder idea that you might have.”

“The trend that we've been seeing for the past five years is a trend that it's gonna accelerate the next five years. And that's a shift to emergent of roles. I just think that we're seeing more designers, engineers, product managers, researchers, kind of all th…”

“It really changes the process once you have the ability to explore this option space in a bigger way, and PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they ne…”

“The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager.”

“I see vibe coding As a skill being added to a lot of job descriptions for designers, for product managers for marketers, which I think is a really interesting shift.”

“Every time you see a bug, every time you see a bug, not most of the time, every time you go and you drop it at the feet of the product manager or the engineering manager, every time. In public, preferably.”

“The AI lifecycle both Pre-deployment and post-deployment is very different as compared to a traditional software life cycle. And so, so a lot of old contracts and handoffs between traditional roles, like say PMs and engineers and data folks has now been broken…”

“I think titles are going to collapse and responsibilities are going to collapse and everyone's just going to be building.”

“Good product managers, I think, are not compensated for writing good PRDs. They're compensated, again, for good judgment, right? Somebody else can do the writing. You, as somebody who directs and builds this product, you need to know, again, what, what's gonna…”

“If you don't respect that person, if you don't believe they know something you don't, you need to quit. You need to go work somewhere else.”

“The other thing I always tell people I've managed is it's your fault if the leaders didn't buy into your idea. Like it's not, you can't just be like, ah, they never, they just don't see it. It's not my fault. They agreed to do something else. I always tell the…”

“I think that we are entering a golden age of product management, not of product managers, but of product management and the core skills that made this function the thing that I love to do.”

“I think that that, that one is, is going to mean that, like, in my eyes, the work with PMs is, like, not going away, actually, and anytime soon, and that, that piece, especially for larger projects, you don't need to do as much of it for smaller stuff, right? …”

“In this world of engineers are mini PMs that the engineer who is like highly product minded is a unicorn is an absolute unicorn. I think the same thing is true for PMs where it's like, okay, now, you know, this, in this ratio of the designers really stressed a…”

“They have not let PMs provide like PowerPoint or keynote presentations on product for like two years. Every presentation on product has to be a workable demo, and they just expect the PMs to create the products, and the execs just refuse to look at static, you…”

“Your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product. In, in the past, I think for the last 10 years, it's like, have you seen the movie before? ... But now if every way of building software and how we deliver product is co…”

“My prediction is the vast majority of people that are listening to this will be in a different job in the next five years, because they will either choose to move to something. Because they will, that company will struggle to stay modern. Just like we're descr…”

“I think that if you have an engineering team of 50 people building things for your customers and you're like, Hey, I want to be the 51st because that's how I get leveraged. I'm like, eh, it's kind of a cheap knockoff of an engineer.”

“Now what we're essentially saying is the information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur. And I think about half of the product people that were kind of, that grew into the industry, you know, have that skill and superpower.”

“I think all of the roles are merging. PMs are doing some engineering work, engineers are doing PM work, designers are PMing and also landing code.”

“And actually almost all the PMs on our team have either been engineers or ship code here on code code.”

“We have this list of team principles, and this includes who our key users are, why those are our key users. And the reason that we articulate all of this is so that everybody on the team feels like they understand how our business works. They understand what's…”

“If you look at the traditional tech org, org structure, you know, designers really are producing visuals. They're not really producing the product direction or the strategy or the vision or, you know, net new That new innovation, right? They're really responsi…”

“In the early days, my view was not that we don't need PMs. My view is that designers should do that work. So that's essentially you know, what we would say to our designers, which was like, you know Hey, if you need PM support, why don't you just do it yoursel…”

“And I generally encourage them to not use the GUIs. And I encourage them to use the tweets because I just know that over time they're going to be curious and like pull at other threads. And one day they wake up and they're like, Oh, I understand more of the su…”

“PM are no longer bottlenecked of if they have an idea waiting on engineering bandwidth.”

“Like now, not only engineers with, we also have designers, PMs, everybody on the Clark code team checks in code.”

“Data scientists are still going to be experts at Can we trust this data? Are we interpreting it the right way? What's the data versus judgment that we should be applying here? A product manager is still going to be exceptional at saying, have we really framed …”

“I have found that PMs, designers, data scientists are able to get farther in the product development life cycle before engineering really needs to be front of the line in unlocking things than was true a couple years ago.”

“I think fundamentally, you didn't ask me this, but there is this question in the community of, do we still need PMs when the models are still capable, when engineers are leaning in I think the role of people who are user centric, who go into the details of und…”

“Folks who spend a lot of the time in their interviews talking about those like alignment meetings and driving alignment and stakeholder management and those pieces, because There's definitely a group of PMs and I certainly used to be one of them earlier in my …”

“We've just passed 20 PMs. We have kind of, I think, 21, 22 PMs in the building today, which for those following what our trajectory is, is pretty small considering the volume of GMV that our sellers move.”

“Hiring so many PMs infantilizers The engineers and the designers who are perfectly capable of making good decisions, but just never had to, because there was always a PM to babysit them.”

“If you talk to most engineers or even designers, they will remember the great PMs that they've worked with mostly because they've worked with so many bad ones.”

“Wherever possible, it's kind of optimal to not have a product manager and instead have design and engineering going through those kinds of steps and making sure that their muscles are well repped.”

“Rather than mapping PMs to teams where you kind of assume that the PM will always do that, we tend to map them to kind of problems or kind of like core projects. And that means that there will be a year more where there isn't a PM attached to a particular engi…”

“I do still think that, and maybe this is thinking about it from like a slightly larger company perspective, but I think you do still need people that have certain responsibilities, right? Because if you have one person that's expected to design, to rally a tea…”