Article
Product Manager vs Founders
X.com
- I’ve long believed that product management is so misunderstood because its nature is vague by design; it’s an odd role within a larger organisation, its true nature distorted in different ways because each company is different.
- A product manager is this person on a team who, crucially, needs to know where to take a product. Have vision. This has to be backed by good product thinking, an understanding of the customer problem, the constraints, the technology, where the world is heading, and how that fits into the micro and macro world around you.
- They need to also, importantly, convince others to give them resources to fulfil that vision. They also need to convince their peers to believe, and understand that vision, and to work together to flesh it out and execute on it
- The big difference between a product manager and a founder is that a product manager already has some infrastructure around them. If you join a company, you don’t need to worry about hiring a sales team - someone’s looking after that. You don’t need to worry about hiring a finance team - it’s covered. You don’t need to worry about setting up culture - it’s there in some shape or form. The company is in motion when you join, not something that has to be brought to life by sheer will from nothing.
- Steve Jobs got fired from the company he founded, because Jobs couldn’t manage politics. He came back years later and then he could. Arguably the best product manager and product marketer on the planet.
- Politics are just the mechanism by which resources get allocated when multiple people want different things. That’s all it is.
- The reason you don’t have politics when you start out with your small startup is that the machinery is not yet so complex, the relationships and incentives not so non-linear where you eventually get Big Company Politics.
- A founder makes their own destiny. No one owes them anything. Their idea might be legitimately bad, or wrong place/wrong time, or they just failed to rally the resources. They either keep trying or give up.
- Do you think when you go to raise capital and talk to VCs, unless you already have a hot product with traction, that the VCs are super cooperative? That they don’t neg you, or don’t tell you how to run your company? Everyone will try to tell you how to do things better, and it’s up to you to keep your own private lighthouse in your mind’s eye.
- Anyway, the main point here, actually, is that I encourage PMs to read more broadly. Read business history. Read the accounts of startup failures. Learn about deal-making. That’s what you model. Not the “product management books”.
- Just like a founder, you don’t truly learn it until you’re in it. At first you probably won’t succeed, but you keep playing until you do, or you give up and find a job where someone tells you what to do.