Let's talk about mental health in #prodmgmt because, whatever some naysayers might say, this is an incredibly tricky job. Even when it's going well it's hard! And it's very often not going well 🧵
Part of me wonders if this is down to many of the big books, you all know the ones, painting an aspirational vision of what product management is & what a product company should be. And, don't get me wrong, I *want* to work for one of those places. But they are few & far between
And, let's face it, even working for companies like that is hard. None of them say product management is easy! So, let's be clear, even in idealistically run, by the book companies, your average product manager's life is going to be incredibly difficult
Look at that through the lens of a non-ideal company, of which there are many, and you have a recipe for disaster. If PMs are having to fight even for the fundamental right to be PMs, on top of the difficulty of being a product manager, it will take a toll
That toll can manifest itself with PMs trying to do too much, or spending half their time firefighting, acting as project managers, analysts, CS, support. And part of this comes with the territory - sitting as we do in the centre of things, we are natural polymaths
But this adds up to an incredible sense of stress, burden, overwork & depression because we're there trying to hold all the strands together in a fundamentally broken system, everyone's blaming us when stuff doesn't work, and praising others when it does
So what to do? If we assume that we can't change company culture in a day, we need to get tactical & do what we can to survive, find the joy that we can. Just reading a book about swimming then jumping in the pool is going to lead to disappointing results
A lot of this boils down to effective product leadership, which seems lacking in many companies. PMs should not be left to struggle alone and need senior product people to step up to the plate, provide air cover, support, coaching & mentoring as appropriate
Aside from that leadership, being able to rely on the support of places like #prodmgmt Twitter or even product management LinkedIn & Facebook, and building a list of peer mentors (f2f or online) to share stories with & commiserate when necessary
Most challenges we face, when we look back on them, were probably not that bad & ultimately situational. Most of the time they've been seen by other people and peer mentorship can be a game changer in this situation. Just having someone tell you it's OK can really help
So find your people, support each other. We should all push our bosses to be a little bit better too. Ultimately we need to try to take the books for what they are, wonderful sources of what we *might* do but adapt them for our own reality & not crush ourselves under their weight
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Combining two mentoring sessions that had similar themes - that tricky situation where the engineering team and product team are misaligned, and this is affecting the progress of the product & dissatisfying customers
So in this age of empowerment & product trios we should call out the key responsibilities of the 2 teams, broadly:
• Product team owns the why & the when, based on market & customer understanding
• Dev teams owns the what & the how, what's possible and the effort involved
The "what" is more of a shared responsibility between dev & UX & product, but the key here is that we want devs to work with us collaboratively to define a solution that is technically feasible, business viable, customer usable (and ethically defensible)
From today's mentoring, talking about the need from leadership to constantly race forward and building new stuff (for competitive advantage / keep sales happy / make clients excited etc). It's a common problem that I've come to refer to as the Barbarossa problem
Operation Barbarossa was Hitler's attempt to overtake Russia by reaching Moscow at lightning speed. It was risky but had high rewards. It also failed spectacularly, as we all now know. The reasons were many, but I'll cherry pick the ones that make my point
A big part of the problem with Barbarossa was that Hitler's army moved faster than their supply lines could keep up. This meant that their troops were isolated and eventually cut off. They got within sight of Moscow but ultimately got bogged down and ultimately repelled.
From recent mentoring session, "I want to advance my #prodmgmt career and step away from individual contribution but am not sure how to do it in my current company". The eternal challenge! For me it's not (just) about job titles, but proximity to strategic decision making 🧵
If you have ambitions to be a product leader (and let's assume you know what types of thing that involves & have identified it's where you want to be) in your current company you have to ask yourself ... what's my path in this current company?
Job titles don't matter (idealistically) but job titles also really matter (in the real world). Who's in front of you? If you have a Senior PM then a Head then a VP then a CPO then, hey, there's a path but all the places are filled. You're probably in for a wait!
From mentoring session today - "is it normal for PMs to work 50-60 hours a week? how can I avoid burnout?"
I mean this is obviously a tricky one and a lot of it depends ony why you're so busy, but my biggest piece of advice is.. let go of some stuff! Wait, what?
• The company / team is understaffed
• You're being made to do stuff that isn't really your job
• You're going down rabbit holes and not giving up
All of these are solvable but they're all difficult to one degree or another
If you're understaffed and stuff needs doing, someone's got to do it right? You could argue you need more staff, or that you need less stuff. I'm always going to be in favour of less stuff because it's easier to make a big impact on fewer things than more things
From tonight's mentoring session, an interesting one with an education leader who is not "in product" (although thinking very much in product terms). Looking at making an impact with productising aspects of education and wondering how to apply product thinking
In this case I do my best @davidjbland impression (my mentee already had David's book!) and talking about the importance of finding out whether your idea is good, and that it's much easier to make a mistake of it's a small one
I've had situations in my product career where I've gone all in way to soon, with predictably disappointing results. The key rule of making bets; if you are off course by 1 degree, it's easy to correct sooner rather than later (by which time you're in a different State)
It's common to see people attacking PMs for being ineffective, or tending to micromanagement, or going too far into solution mode. Obviously we don't want to excuse poor behaviour, but we also have to call out that it many companies it feels like PM vs the world 🧵
In many companies, product managers are more like project managers, with little to no real control over their product roadmap, buffeted by client / sales demands & not even able to talk to customers
We can talk all day about ineffective leadership & ineffective companies, but let's concentrate on the effects on the PMs. PMs in these companies aren't empowered to actually define the direction of the product and are primarily pushed by management to "optimise engineering"