The courage to be a product manager
Without this you're not going to be great.
I recently finished The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. The book was an absolute revelation for me on how to think about living one’s life. I won’t take away anything from the book by giving any sort of summary - you should absolutely read it and make your own conclusions.
However, one of the things that I wanted to share by drawing parallels was the courage it takes to be a great product manager. Why do I say that? It’s because as a product manager you are taught that you will have to say “No” A LOT. Everyone has an opinion on what product changes one should make to drive business outcomes but in the end the product manager has to make a call based on part art and part science.
Most companies’ priorities aren’t clear. Even with a meta-backlog there are tier 2 and tier 3 priorities. Within each priority is a mishmash of outcomes metrics that are at times at odds with each other. In the end the product manager has to work through it all and in that process, someone is going to dislike your decisions because you didn’t prioritize their business metric at the top.
You have to have confidence in yourself, your thinking, and your decisions. You ARE going to be wrong multiple times and there may be fingers pointed at you on the decision after the fact but that is the courage you have to build over and over again. I’d argue that if you don’t have this courage then you won’t be a great product manager. Just by saying Yes to everything that is flowing your way, you’re not really a product manager, forget being great.
YOU have to be intentional in your decisions - every aspect thought through.
It’s also unfortunate that most companies won’t offer you the ability to execute on this courage. That usually is reflected by a collection of people making the decision as a committee - could be your manager, your GM, or your CEO. This is why most products we come across are “blah” - because that one person wasn’t allowed to exercise their courage to deliver the vision they had in mind. You will have to be mindful of these spaces and whether you truly have the ability to grow in that space by making yourself uncomfortable.
But for now, focus on that courage. Once you build that, no one can take that away from you and you are going to love yourself because of that ability.
Note: if anyone takes this post as “I can now be an a**hole and say No” then you didn’t understand what I was trying to say. Come talk to me and we can chat more. It’s completely free to book time with me here.