Why I love Product Management
Like most jobs, Product Management has its ups and downs. There’s days, and even weeks or months which are frustrating slog uphill, where nothing seems to work or go to plan and everything is on fire. Fortunately, there’s things to love about product management too.
There’s a long standing principle in Product Management that you shouldn’t fall in love with a solution, you should fall in love with a problem. That takes a little bit of unpacking, but roughly it means that if a given solution to a problem isn’t “the best” any more (whatever “the best” means for you), you should be able to let it go, and try something else. The solution isn’t our baby. Our baby is the problem — what are we trying to make better, what are we trying to fix for our customers?
This is something I’ve always been good at. When I was working as an R&D engineer, it would usually start as a feeling that something was missing, a feeling that there was something we should be able to do or something we should be able to figure out. In that role, sometimes it meant weeks or months experimenting, trying new models, and plenty of banging my head against a table. We didn’t always find a solution of course. Sometimes we shelved things to come back to, and other times we discovered the solution to a problem we didn’t even know about yet.
Today, the place the sense of should tends to come from somewhere more structured. In my current and previous role I’ve worked on PaaS roles, so I’m generally given a direction by the business to make the developer experience better. I’m not a software engineer myself, so my sense of customer empathy and understanding the problems being faced by my customers isn’t intuitive at all, but the research and discovery work still leads to the same place — an understanding that a particular thing isn’t the way it should be, and a desire to make it better.
Ultimately, loving Product Management is loving understanding why something isn’t working, what the need or the desire is, and then fixing it.
This was a short but pretty navel-gazey post, so if you’ve stuck with me thus far, give me a few claps, and consider following me to get all my latest posts straight to your inbox.
