How to navigate a product job
Navigating a job with no clear rules, shifting priorities, and endless trade-offs
Product management isn’t one job. It’s whatever the company needs it to be. And what a company needs changes constantly.
Some companies need vision, others need execution. Some need structure, others need speed. If you think of a company’s strengths and weaknesses as a radial graph, they will be great at some things and bad at others.
Your next company won’t have the same strengths or gaps. So you selfishly have to prepare for everything.
I believe that your goal as someone more junior in this field is to put yourself in a position where you get the chance to continue working on products. More reps give you more chances to make the mistakes that eventually make you good.
If you are a product manager, your job will include some aspect of delivery.
The people who try to run from delivery because it’s “not real product management” are missing the point. Until the product is out the door and has the business results required, it’s your duty to get it over the line.
If the company has a delivery manager, great. If not, do not stop the train. Get good at it. Get good at clarifying your thoughts into tickets, get good at making it clear for other people not only what, but why you are doing the work that you are doing.
You will be seen as reliable, as the person that “gets stuff done”. That makes you crucial to the company. Speed compounds, if you ship faster, you learn faster. If you learn faster, you become better. If you get better, you get a chance at working on bigger things.
Nobody said, “He’s a bad product manager because he’s so good at delivery.”
Product managers are a little bit of everything. This is a generalist job.
The best product managers are a little bit T-shaped. They are good at their job, but they are interested in everything around their job. Don’t try to explain to other people how to do their job, but learn the 80/20 of all the tangent departments that you work with. Other people appreciate that too: because you won’t come into the meeting asking for unreasonable things.
Read Reddit or Hacker News and understand what other departments don’t like about product management. The same respect you pay to product, the same respect other people pay to their craft.
Don’t take product management books at face value
Product management books often paint an aspirational picture of what the job should be. In this field, the grass is truly greener. Other product managers read those books and think, “This company doesn’t do that, but I bet other companies do,” and the cycle repeats over and over.
A lot of product management is improvisation, it’s fixing problems that shouldn’t be there in the first place. You need to read those books, but try to ask other product managers how their job is different. The ground will often look different from the map.
Your reputation matters
Show up on time in meetings, take notes, send action points to the team, set reminders to follow up. You don’t have to be liked to do your job, but it sure helps. You don’t have a choice not to work with people in this field. In the corporate world, you will hear a lot of “Let’s catch up about this later” or “I’ll follow up about this”. You will be amused by how many people are surprised when you do follow up.
Think about who has the power to make your life bad or good, and hold a mental compass of how you look in their eyes. You work with a lot of people, but realistically, only some will be able to influence your career.
There’s a difference between challenging bad ideas and challenging authority for the sake of it. Calling out your boss in public doesn’t always work. Criticizing in public makes people default to being on the defensive. Do not gossip about your peers.
Think like someone who has a big stake in the company’s success
One problem product managers have is tunnel vision. Juniors are often interested in how. The more senior you get, the more you will be interested in the why because the type of problems you deal with will be bigger.
A junior product manager who discusses business goals and can draw a reasoning line between their work and the goal is seriously impressive. Imagine you own 50% of the company: what would need to be true for the company to make it big?
You are employed by the business, in the service of the business, even though you will spend most of your time with the development team and your end users. When people say, “We need to prioritize the most important thing,” that thing is not always the end user.
This is harsh, but in my experience, true. You will sometimes have to defend the end user in front of the company, and there are some things you can’t always win.
The products that are best received are the ones that do well for the company and do well for the end user. Sometimes you will have to figure out how to do good for the company without hurting the end user. The more senior you get, the more these trade-offs will become frequent in your discussions.
Not everyone in your team will have an “all-in” mentality.
If you work in a startup and most of your colleagues are under 30, you might hang around in the office just for fun. Back when I was working in-person, I would hang around with people until 8-9 pm. It often felt like university part 2.
When you join a bigger company, you will find yourself surrounded by people at different phases in their life. Life happens, people have kids, and the company is a way to earn a living. That’s fine: don’t force it.
Sometimes it’s just little things that make the difference. That person will appreciate that you put meetings on Thursday only after lunch so they can be there for school runs.
If you pivot from fields where work was quantifiable. This will be a shock.
I came from design; I had a portfolio that I could point at and just say, “I did this.”
There will be times when you will be tired at the end of the day, and you won’t even know what you got done. If your product cycle is long, it will take a while to understand if you did a good job.
This is not to put the job on a pedestal and say that it’s a thankless job. But in the end, you are an enabler for the team and the business. Some people will clap for you when a product does well. Take it in for a moment, then immediately point towards your team: the people that did the work.
It’s great for them to get the recognition they deserve; you already had your reputation strengthened.
You won’t take those claps with you in your next job, but you will be there with your team tomorrow solving the next thing.
Not all companies are the same
At the beginning of this essay, I argued that you get better by getting more reps in. But not all reps are equal: some are worth 10x more than others.
If you join a slow-moving company, you might get one or two meaningful reps per year. But if you join a fast-moving company, you might get a big multiple of that. The best place to learn is a funded startup with real momentum. Not just because of the velocity, but because their existence requires them to make bigger bets.
They often won’t have the luxury of over-analysing every decision. You will have to make calls with incomplete information and figure things out as you go. It’s going to be a little bit more stressful, but you will optimise your rate of learning.
Some venture funds have job boards for their portfolio companies. Here’s some from a16z and Sequoia
A disclaimer here that, sometimes when things move fast, they are driven by chaos. Fast-moving companies are great for learning through repetitions, but not always the best places for mentorship or structure.
Some of this won’t apply to you. Either you had a different experience, or you do not naturally function like this. As always, exercise caution, challenge my assumptions, and take whatever is needed.
I am sure in a couple of years I will have more things to add, but I hope something in here was useful. I appreciate you reading this.
💯 Agree! Sometimes I feel like an octopus 😂 doing and learning 8 things at the same time: "The best product managers are a little bit T-shaped. They are good at their job, but they are interested in everything around their job. Don’t try to explain to other people how to do their job, but learn the 80/20 of all the tangent departments that you work with. Other people appreciate that too—because you won’t come into the meeting asking for unreasonable things."