After 2½ years of being a PM on his current team, he is excited to take on a new challenge as PM in a different org at Acme.
Here’s what his manager had to say about Bob's work thus far as a PM:
Fast-forward 6 months. Things are not going so well for Bob on his new team.
Here’s what his new manager has to say about Bob's work over these 6 months:
Same person, same behaviors, different contexts, very different outcomes.
What could Bob have done to avoid this situation on the new team?
Frankly, Bob could not have avoided this situation on his own. As a first-time PM on the Notifications team, he was very successful because he (unwittingly) did what strong PMs are supposed to do: manage based on the context of the team & the product.
Bob’s “be at the center-of-everything” style was *exactly* what the Notifications team needed. But no one bothered to coach Bob that this is not the only operating style of successful PMs. Not knowing any better, Bob replicated & doubled down on his default style on the Ads team.
Now, the Ads team was already very empowered & independent. The same micromanagement that the Notifications team found very useful, the Ads engineers & designers found stifling. Naturally then, Bob was left confused about what really went wrong. Was it him or was it his new team?
Here's the reality:
You can get good at product management by becoming an expert in one style. But if you want to be great at it and create much greater career optionality for yourself, you need to be a lot more adaptive.
Don’t be dogmatic about the “one right way”.
There may actually be a “one right way” of doing things on a given team, but show me 10 different teams & companies, and I will show you 11 different “right ways”.
Back to Bob though, being a newish PM with experience on only one team, he really stood no chance here without his original manager on the Notifications team and his new manager on the Ads team coaching him on the difference in contexts and the need for him to be more adaptive.
Sadly, many PM leaders are themselves unaware that context should inform a PM’s approach more than generic best practices. Often, PM leaders are themselves trying to repeat the formulas that previously worked for *them* at Google / Facebook / other megacorp, with limited success.
Which brings me to the 2 most important takeaways of this thread:
1) Context matters most
2) It is a product leader’s vital responsibility to be a skilled reader of current context & an effective coach on how to best operate within that context
A good product leader can tell when it makes sense to ditch defaults vs. when it makes sense to double-down on them.
So look for this skill if you are looking to hire a product leader (as a founder/CEO) or looking to work with one (as a PM).
As for what happened to Bob, I like to imagine that after a rocky first 6 months, he got a new manager who was highly skilled in contextual coaching, and so Bob was able to adapt his style to focus on the high leverage stuff himself & empower his team members much more.
Black Turtleneck Fallacy
Valuing time
Product clarity exercise
Instinct matters in product
Success + Tranquility
Recognizing happiness
Simple stuff
Transactional managers
% confidence
Writer's block for PMs
A tragedy of many orgs
and more..
When allocating their time, most people just seek a positive ROI. To achieve much greater outcomes in lesser time, you should instead seek to minimize Opportunity Cost. Probably the most valuable thing I will ever say, especially for senior product folks.
(this might be useful if you are a product manager, product leader, or founder)
Before we jump in:
Frameworks will not fix all your problems.
Used right, they should help you 1) better understand your context 2) create structure for problems 3) communicate ideas & solutions
I often use these frameworks in my product work, sometimes without realizing it.
1/ 3X framework (Kent Beck)
A product can be in one of 3 stages 1. Explore 2. Expand 3. Extract
For product leaders this is the most vital framework to understand because almost every important decision should account for the stage your product is in.
If you use this for the right things, you'll accomplish a lot more than constant talking for 1 hr
Another thing:
Much of the business world's processes are highly optimized for extroverts. This approach creates a more balanced structure for introverts & extroverts to contribute.
Below is a concrete example of this working session approach, for pre-mortems. The @coda_hq template linked in this tweet provides the end-to-end structure for you to run such a working session.
Includes:
- A template for pre-mortems
- How product creativity dies
- False Positive Products
- Being more strategic
- B2B strategy primer
- Personal growth inhibitors
- Work stress
- Curated lists
- Internal roles
- Using logic
& much more....
👇🏾
A template that you can copy to run an effective (and fun) pre-mortem with your team for your upcoming launch (created via a collab with @coda_hq)
The hardest part of product creativity is not the ideation. It is the negotiation necessary to get the folks who are fixated on logic & math to appreciate the value of product creativity.