I’ve been smelling my own farts as a PM for a long time. The more I do this, the less I know. Here’s what I happen to believe right now:

1. “Product” isn’t a role
2. The worst thing a PM can be is intelligent
3. Stay out of the spotlight
4. I still don’t know what epics and stories are
5. Metrics suck
6. There’s no “way to do product”
7. …Surprise opinion at the end…

“Product” isn’t a role

You’re not “product.” The team is “product”*. This sounds corny. It’s critical. I really mean this.

The title “product manager” is the person whose unique contribution is customer and market and strategic context (and talking to the other people in the company). Your engineering partner brings creativity and solutions and constraints. Your design partner brings usability and user experience. Everyone overlaps on each other. It’s a mess. It’s beautiful.

There’s no “waiting for product” or “product said this or that”. Ebi Atawodi, Netflix

The biggest wins (and most enjoyable periods of teamwork) worked like this: I dig up metrics/support tickets/interviews/everything → connect some dots → bring it to the team → they make me do more homework → they come up with brilliant ideas → we validate it together → hit the road.

Here’s what it has never looked like: I write a spec → I share with the team → they build the thing and ask me questions along the way → what would anyone here do without me.

Get over yourself, product managers. Great things come from a team that holds the same context, not “from product.”

*Oh, failure is still yours. That part doesn’t change. It just means that you are the owner of risks and proactively taking care of things that could go wrong.

The worst thing a PM can be is intelligent

This is a direct quote from Gig Kaplan, the co-founder of Wix and it took me eight years for it to sink in.

“Smart” people are good at painting incredible narratives from way too little data — and quickly. This is the fast lane to losing respect of your teammates and stakeholders — or worse, building crap no one wants.

Leadership is expertise. — Bill Walsh

Instead of being intelligent, do your homework. Doing your homework is the ultimate influence card. Doing your homework transcends rank and seniority and politics.

Listen to/attend more customer calls than anyone else. Take in more Amplitude charts than anyone else. Read more support tickets than anyone else. You get the picture.

Stay out of the spotlight

The reason we succeeded was that the executive team didn’t care about us until it was too late. — Sarig Reichert, Wix Promote

Two things about PMs: we’re overachievers, and we don’t have anything to point at and say “I made that.”

Instead, we crave the praise and admiration of others, especially executives. I used to think that being on a headliner/sexy/flagship projects with executive involvement meant that I was successful/important/valuable/good at life*.

I learned the hard way — work with the least amount of attention and expectations that you can get away with. Ideally, your colleagues and executives should hear about your work when either 1) you need their collaboration or 2) it’s already giving them value.

Why? Exec attention is the antithesis of small, modest, test and learn, humility, curiosity, small teams, scrappiness, and all the things that make for successful products. Attention makes you optimize for fulfilling expectations (that got imagined before the research even began) instead of building the right thing.

*Pro tip: find other avenues for self worth.

I still don’t know what epics and stories are

Seriously. I have no clue* (and I suspect that you don’t either).

Lucky for uh, planet earth, none of these artifacts really matter. What really matters is:

1. Your team knows the context and the evidence
2. You’ve mutually eliminated as much uncertainty as possible [as cheaply as possible]

If you don’t do that together, I don’t care how you decide to write-down-what-we’re-gonna-do-together: you are a bottleneck, and your team won’t reach a fraction of their collective potential.

We can also stop debating PRDs for the same reason, they can be the worst thing ever (you sat alone in your study and produced a masterpiece) or the best thing ever (it documents the end result of conversations and experiments done with your design and engineering partners).

In other words,

Culture over process. — Henrik Kniberg (the skateboard → scooter → bike → car guy)

* Even worse: I’ve barely spent much time in Jira in my life. And the few times I have, it was while holding hands with my engineering partner.

Metrics suck

Your Key Result is going to be a shitty proxy for your Objective.

Your North Star is going to be a shitty proxy for your Mission.

And that’s okay.

I’ve been on teams where the KR was extremely straightforward, and I’ve been on teams where the closest thing to a good KR wasn’t something we could even measure.

One of my colleagues and mentors, Buster Benson, was head of platform at Slack. They realized their north star wasn’t something that they had the tools at the time to measure. So what did they do? Get to work anyways.

I’ve learned that the “O” is more important than the “KR.”

Meaning, if you can state in plain English what you’re trying to do, you’re 95% there. Metrics are just our best effort to try to reflect the best number that indicates that those plain simple English words came true. Instead of asking how to move the needle for that metric, ask how you can accomplish the objective.

Sticking too closely to metrics can be a wasteful philosophical discussion at best, and a recipe for perverse incentives at worst. They’re what Shreyas Doshi calls “apple pie positions,” where “the personal risk of pushing back is so high that almost everyone nods ‘yes,’ even though it is rarely the right answer for the team / company / user.”

I can confidently say that metrics are useful, and we should never forget how much they suck.

There’s no “way to do product”

There’s no rules in product, just like there’s no rules in life.

The last two companies I worked at could not have operated more differently. Both have great cultures, both have ironclad principles that made them succeed in their markets.

That’s all they have in common. They operate totally differently in terms of explicit/implicit communication, culture, frameworks or lack thereof, role of a product manager, organizational structure, I can keep going.

Both were founded around the same time, and both succeeded wildly.

Let go of the Google OKRs and the Amazon press releases. Run with whatever’s gonna make your team do its best work in your market. I found these words from Jocelyn Goldfein to be incredibly wise:

I’ve been around the block and shipped a lot of software. I’ve worked at tech companies ranging from three to 10,000+ employees. I’ve built software that’s been given away for free and sold for $50M license fees — and just about every price point in between.

Every one of these products was developed and delivered differently, and after having the chance to compare and contrast them all, I’d love to reveal the one true way to ship software. I’m abashed to confess that I cannot.

I’ve discovered and rediscovered the “right” way to build and ship software many times. I’ve found near-religious zeal for certain practices (say, precise coding estimates, thoroughly detailed specs or UI design via A/B test) only to find the magic gone when I tried to apply it to some other product.

In short, apply your own common sense, go with the flow, get shit done. Don’t worry too much — there is no right way (although there’s lots of wrong ways).

Which brings me to my last opinion…

Don’t read blog posts — write them instead

I’m a junkie for product blog posts. I’ve written a few myself 👋. Let’s get some spoilers out of the way about product management blog posts:

1. They’re massive selection bias for things that actually worked
2. They’re a prettified version of what really happened
3. The next great company will be the exception

You know how to find out the next hot trend and best practice in product management? For that, I have another great Buster Benson quote:

In the weeds is where it’s at.

Get in the kitchen, solve the unique problems of your unique customers, and apply original thinking as a team. A few months later, and BOOM you’re the bleeding edge of the industry.

(It definitely does not take a decade.)