What makes you a good or bad Product Manager
I am reading this fantastic book written by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. A hard but true story about someone who has lived the Dotcom years at the beginning of the 21 century, full of insightful paragraphs about he succeeded in difficult situations.
He wrote in 1997 a training document about Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager, saying that a good training is highly important to align your expectation (as an executive manager) to the PMs work. He says that this document is probably not relevant for today’s product managers, however, I think some paragraphs are long-lasting.
You can find the full text here, but I will give you some of my favourite parts, that I believe it seems as relevant today as when he wrote it:
Be a master of your Product
A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no excuses).
Enlight the problem but provide a solution
Bad product managers have lots of excuses. Not enough funding, the engineering manager is an idiot, Microsoft has 10 times as many engineers working on it, I’m overworked, I don’t get enough direction. Barksdale doesn’t make these kinds of excuses and neither should the CEO of a product.
Show the direction and trust your team to find the “how”
Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out “how”.
Provide enough content about your Product for stakeholders
Good product managers create leveragable collateral, FAQs, presentations, white papers. Bad product managers complain that they spend all day answering questions for the sales force and are swamped.
Know your competitor, but don’t focus only on them.
Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is building.
Prioritize efficiently
Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during outbound. Bad product managers get very confused about the differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity.
Have clear goals and metrics
Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad product managers constantly want to be told what to do.
Have discipline on reports to stakeholders
Good product managers send their status reports in on time every week, because they are disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send in their status reports on time, because they don’t value discipline.
