Halls, Gum Drops and Product Management
How I explain what Product Management is
When I started working with Product Management, I needed to explain what it was to the company so everyone could understand the new role we didn't have before. So I took an example from my time in the military to use as an analogy.
When I was in basic training in the Sargeant's course to build a career in the Brazilian Army, we were rarely allowed to leave the base, so it kinda developed a “market” inside it, where people that could go out would bring stuff for us inside, like convenience store stuff, food, etc.
So in one of the rare weekends we were allowed to go home, I went to my parents city and had the idea to take some stuff to sell to my colleagues and make some money. So I bought two boxes of Halls and three boxes of gum drops sugar candies.
The candies sold like candy (lol), but the Halls… how can I put this: I had to eat A LOT of Halls the following months. Nobody wanted it, but the guys would come looking for me from other platoons to see if I still had gum drop sugar candies to sell.
I've used this analogy in a way to explain what we would be doing as Product: we would be making sure that we had the “right product” for our customers. In my story, the Halls was definitely not the right product there, in that context, for those customers, in that market - but the gum drops sugar candies was definitely the right product, there was definitely product-market fit 🤣.
Therefore it's not enough to simply have a product to sell, we need to have the right product, the right features, and since we were working on BUILDING the product, our role would be to guarantee that we were building the right thing.
Or as Ben Horowitz1 would say: “right product right time”.
Since I used this analogy to explain what I thought was product, I have read and experienced a bunch around the “product management” world, but with time I've been accumulating also uncertainty and imposter's syndrome.
Although we build things, we work with a team, we see the results of our work on bringing a team together and delivering results for happy customers, we have always that feeling that we might not really know what we are doing.
And… probably, that is not a bug, but a feature.
If we're too sure of ourselves, maybe we'd stop talking to customers, support, maybe we wouldn't care that much with success metrics or wouldn't consider different angles before making a decision.
So if you are a product manager and you have imposter's syndrome… I guess… it's ok? It's probably part of the job.
And product management is about having the right product and the right time and “all that entails”, as Ben Horowitz said in the cited article. That means that it's the Product Manager's responsibility to guarantee that the right product is being built and that it's delivered at the right time.
Is most organizations, that will mean talking to customers, support team, engineers, designers, managers, writing documents to build alignment, organize and participate in meetings, all of that with the single goal of having the right product at the right time for your customers. You are the product manager, not anyone else.
For all the failures of the product, you should take responsibility and be accountable. For all the successes, you should praise the team that designed and built the product, that supported customers, etc. In other words, your only chance of achieving success is through the team.
That means you need to be extremely connected to your team, you need trust them and earn their trust, you should be able to rely on them and be reliable the same.
Finally, to understand more about Product Manager's job, you should definitely read Inspired2 by Marty Cagan, and Continuous Discovery Habits3, by Teresa Torres.
If you're already a Product Managers and the above books are already familiar to you, you can read Escaping the Build Trap4 and Product Operations5, both by Melissa Perri.
https://a16z.com/good-product-manager-bad-product-manager/
https://www.amazon.com.br/Inspired-Create-Tech-Products-Customers/dp/1119387507
https://www.amazon.com.br/Continuous-Discovery-Habits-Discover-Products-ebook/dp/B094PVB97X/
https://a.co/d/087276Ul
https://a.co/d/0gEXYywK