Distilled PM Advice

I wouldn’t say that I’m a great PM by any means, but I’m fortunate to have had years of fun shipping products as part of my career. To cut to the chase, here’s some of the lessons I’ve learned in their distilled forms.

What do you do as a PM

As a PM, you’re the intersection of the customer, the business’s best interests, and the execution of functionality by engineering.

Your primary partnership is with engineering. Depending on the pace of your organization and the challenges you tackle, the delineation of responsibilities may be fuzzy in some areas. Communicate about the tactical execution instead of trying to create impermeable boundary walls.

How do you do it

The primary tools at your disposal are asking questions, dissecting data, creating prototypes, and communicating to build buy-in.

Who do you do it with

Knowing who your stakeholders are involves understanding what motivates them, what their strengths/weaknesses are, and what gaps you may need to fill to get where you want to go.

Keep the customer at the center

You are not your customer, but you do have to build empathy for their perspectives.

Your customers are not a monolith. Understand the edges on the core “persona” definition.

The triad of customer-business-engineering is potentially leaning more towards business-engineering in the execution area, which means you’re going to have to advocate for the customer side hardest.