Revisiting "Good PM, Bad PM"
Some things are worth revisiting every now and again. Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager is one of those posts that I reread occasionally to make sure that my day to day job hasn’t led me astray. After all, who hasn’t gotten tired of explaining the obvious or been tempted to come up with an excuse for why things failed?
If you haven’t read the blog post before, I highly recommend going through it once. It’s a short and engaging read.
Good PM/Bad PM really resonates with me because:
It is opinionated.
It is (mostly) timeless. What constitutes leadership and what constitutes a cop-out hasn’t changed in the past 15 years.
It is simple to follow. You don’t need to be a PM to understand the lessons here.
Diving deeper into point #2, here are a couple snippets that I think are still relevant today and one that I find to be no longer helpful.
What is still relevant today
“Good product managers are the marketing counterpart of the engineering manager.”
This one-liner is somewhat buried in the original post but it is one of the most salient points Ben makes. I believe that PMs should be the best salespeople in the entire organization. If you are working in enterprise software, how can you expect the sales team to sell something if you can’t sell it yourself? If you are not working in enterprise, you still need to sell your vision, the value of your team, etc, to the organization.
People think “selling” is a dirty word. Selling doesn’t mean self-promotion. There are lots of wrong ways to do this. Posting your accomplishments to Slack is not selling. Selling is often an intense 1:1 activity, where you try to convince someone else that you are on the winning team and explain in detail why they should also be onboard. Done correctly, you will have a happy, driven team who is focused on a singular vision, and everyone else clamoring to help you achieve that goal.
“Good product managers define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem).”
This is a great summary of how PMs should approach roadmap and prioritization. In a hundred years, I imagine the advice here will probably still be relevant.
In my experience, very few PMs these days propose projects that can’t be executed. In fact, I see PMs giving too much deference to engineers. As the result, roadmaps are filled with safe, low-impact projects, and PMs say yes too often to refactors that don’t deliver any user value.
What is not relevant anymore
“Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press.”
It’s interesting that PMs used to engage with press. I can barely write emails that are appropriate internally so I don’t imagine having to represent the company to the media.
Silicon Valley’s relationship to the press has also changed significantly over the past 15 years. Press releases are no longer the best way to get news out about a product release. Sentiment around the tech industry has also shifted over time. Either way, I am thankful that most of this work has been outsourced to PR folks.
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Good PM/Bad PM is a good reminder that, while process might change, the fundamentals of product management is largely the same. What is also striking is how easy it is to slip into the category of a “bad PM”. Like the dark side, if we are too focused on the short term or let our worst impulse take hold, it is easy to go down this other path.
The good news is that I rarely see bad PMs anymore. However, I also see fewer PMs making big bets. There’s a thin line between delivering a great product and a product that’s undeliverable, but that’s the space that you have to transverse if you want to be great.