If I’ve learned anything being a product manager it’s that product managers are all incessant know-it-alls. This position (and probably most of the high tech leadership positions) specifically attract nerds who have type-A personalities and at some point fancy themselves some weird combination of Alan Turing and Warren Buffet.
This makes a certain amount of sense when you consider the amount and diversity of the information you’re working with. A PM has to be both evil suit and unkempt hacker – or at least enough of each to be able to fluently communicate with both extremes. If I go into a room with a software engineer and I can’t speak in algorithms and programming, I’m not going to be able to really interface with that individual and get the information I need. Similarly, not being able to understand finance and corporate strategy renders you completely useless and unintelligible to essential folks who work in both capacities. Ultimately, a PM lives and dies by his or her knowledge of everything and anything related to how their product is created, sold, and ultimately received by both the customer and the competition. If you’re a know-it-all, you’re more likely to be motivated in your pursuit of trying to master everything.
And you’re probably going to miss a lot of stuff along the way.
One of the other big things I’ve learned as a PM is that you frankly can’t know everything. There’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to be as masterfully good at programming as my product’s engineers, nor am I going to be as much of an accounting and revenue projection wizard as my financial analysts. Sure, I can do a bit of both and look and talk the part on some days. But the reality is that I just don’t have the training/experience or spend as much time concentrating on either area to become a specialist in it as much of the people who do spend time on it and do train specifically to do that. If I try to take over and play developer or accountant/analyst when I can’t, I not only might screw up whatever I’m doing and not know it, I’m also wasting valuable time that’s more efficiently served by letting someone else just do their job.
This catch 22 of trying to know everything but recognizing you can’t extends far beyond the academic areas that govern high tech. It also plays into the market knowledge that’s core to what a product manager does on a day to day basis. When I first started talking to customers, I noticed that half the time I wasn’t really listening to what they were saying much as I was trying to validate assumptions I’ve made.
Again, this consequence of know-it-all-ism is pretty bad. If I’m just using the customer and his/her information as a way of confirming or denying my own opinions, I’m not really learning about the market so much as I’m just going in circles around my own ruminations. If something changes I’m less likely to catch it because I won’t be listening to what’s going on. In effect, I’m going to miss the hidden message in the music because I’m only listening for a specific lyric.
Being a product manager isn’t about knowing everything. Absolute brilliance isn’t required for the job (nor is it feasible). Instead, effective product managers are excellent communicators. I may not know the answer myself, but I can find someone who does and channel that communication in my strategy and in my messaging.
Brilliance is just knowing the right people and asking the right questions.
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