I love creating things. This blog is one thing I’ve made. Another example is my enjoyment of cooking and experimenting with recipes. I cook because I (usually) love the result of being able to enjoy the food I put effort into creating. I even don’t mind when a dish isn’t so amazing because I will develop ideas of how I can make it better next time. I recently tried to make colored pasta and used beet juice to try and provide a magenta color to the dough. The pasta came out well, but the bold color I wanted was ultimately not that brilliant. I plan to try it again soon.

The process of cooking often reminds me of being a software product manager because you start with an idea, imagine the future, and work on a number of parallel activities to achieve it. Unless you are practiced and precise, the process can go sideways unexpectedly. Before you start, you need to imagine the end, and bring together many different parts, steps, and techniques to get to your result successfully. I once had a manager who would say, “You build who you are.” It’s an interesting phrase. How you approach your job is how your product turns out.

In PM there are many ways to be successful, and equally many ways to be mediocre or fail. Some companies with well established PM culture excel at the ‘performing the craft’ of product management. Most companies in my career experience however tend to let you do whatever you want by not giving input or guidance on how to be a PM. That may sound like freedom, but it can be a recipe for products or features with incomplete vision, missing go to market, missing important attributes, or poor fit with company vision. 

ROOT OF THE PROBLEM

‘Do whatever you want’ is a symptom for a company with no PM processes or training. One dirty secret that I’ve noticed in my time in Silicon Valley is that most companies offer no training at all for PMs. This is especially true in start-ups. The start-up case is more understandable but it extends outwards as companies grow which can become problematic long term. If you’re struggling to survive, you hire people who have existing strong talents who are immediately value-additive. It’s a reasonable approach. Start-ups that thrive hire additional people, but often fail to consider training. This creates teams with highly variable PM skills and culture just a few years out.

I’ve heard first-hand anecdotes that old blue chip companies like IBM and Microsoft have robust training regimens for hires. They teach you what you need to know. It’s a great value proposition for joining a big corporate company as you start your career. E.g. I have a good friend who joined AWS as a sales architect two years ago and he told me that he was not allowed even speak to a customer until he successfully completed nearly a hundred hours of various product training. These companies are not common in my experience; at least not for PM roles. If you’re starting your career and you can get into a company that will train you, I think this is a great way to begin for long-term success. By the way, my friend that joined AWS was already a stellar SE before he joined. That’s company commitment to training for a strong employee base and reliable customer experience.

‘You build who you are’, therefore, is shorthand for the sum of your personal values, attention or inattention to detail, level of follow-through, ability to document, ability to work with other people, etc. as they pertain to what and how you build product. These reflect in product who you are as a person. It helps to explain why some people are natural PMs while some are less effective. It can also help explain why some PMs never get the whole product out the door. You don’t build what you don’t care about.

EXAMPLE ATTRIBUTES

Here are a few personal attributes that contribute to how people translate who they are into what they create. There are undoubtedly more that could be applied.

ORGANIZATION

Are you organized or disorganized? Getting a product to ship in a large organization, i.e. more than 200 people, means you have to work with many teams to reach a final product. Larger more mature companies organize labor into specialized teams including release management, documentation, QA, system test, engineering, support, sales, marketing, and more. We’re all gears in the machine. If you’re disorganized you are relying unfairly on other teams to cover for your gaps. That can show up in the end product. In my world of cloud computing software, OpenStack is a prime example. Nothing worked together with OpenStack and it was very painful for customers to get running. The product components were shipped separately and didn’t simply work together. It wasn’t organized and any OpenStack purchase had to be paired with a company also investing at least five engineers to get it installed, and permanently staffed to keep it running. Just to be clear, this was a permanent investment even before you got any value out of OpenStack, which was dead money.

OPERATIONS

It takes motivation and talent to be the active gear in the machine that gets all other gears turning in the right direction to produce the right end result. These PMs are valuable. A good PM needs more than the ability to move people however. They need some amount of product vision. If they don’t possess vision you can end up with a talented project manager and this is not great. PMs have to constantly ask customers and themselves why they are building something, and is it the right solution to the problem statement? A project manager cares about time, scope, and cost. They don’t necessarily care about the vision. That’s no slight on good project managers by the way. Vision is not their responsibility. It is for PMs though. When a PM is operating and moving product through the system, a narrow operational mindset can get them off track and not solving the urgent customer problems. What’s worse, they might not ask the critical questions along the way. If that happens, you get bad product delivered on time, for low cost, an in-scope. Your release date is meaningless when the product is wrong.

REGULARITY

Inspiration is awesome. So are bursts of creativity. They are transient however. Great PMs keep showing up; especially on the days when there is no creativity, the engineering team is late, your execs are debating disruptive new ideas, someone on a dependent team just resigned, etc etc. Great PMs keep trying to talk to customers, and keep working on the present and future. What you do everyday outweighs what you do occasionally.

PRESSURE

In the course of product development, a PM may occasionally need to insert themselves to adjust and align team efforts. These periodic interrupts can be necessary, but consistent gentle pressure is better. In engineering there is a concept of entropy. Entropy is defined as, a “lack of order or predictability; (a) gradual decline into disorder.” I would express this from a PM perspective that a product effort left untended by its PM will slowly devolve into something you don’t want. Great PMs know the end state they need, and keep regular and consistent pressure on the various teams until the product is delivered. You may still need occasionally to add more pressure urgently, but there is never a time when there is no pressure.

PACE

PMs set the running pace of the team. If you phone in your effort and your pace is slow, the entire org sees this and they will meet you at your pace. If you show no urgency, they give you late, half-hearted results without urgency. This is human nature. No one needs to care more than you. If you don’t care, no one else will either. Remember, enterprise product sales is a zero-sum game. E.g. If you’re selling an expensive product to a company for six or seven figures, that customer is not buying two of them. If someone beats you to the sale, you lost. For big purchase tools which are complicated to install and configure, you might have a chance to compete again in 5+ years for that same customer. E.g. Servers have a useful lifespan of ~3-4 years. Storage arrays have a useful life of ~5 years. These are not consumer products. When you don’t like your cordless ear buds, you grumble and buy another pair. When you don’t like your storage vendor, you’re stuck with them for several years. This kind of competition requires that PMs build and deliver customer value on time. Your competitor will set the pace if you don’t.

YOUR PRODUCT IS YOU

If you love building and iterating to constantly make your results better, then you may already understand that you bring yourself intimately to your PM job. You keep striving because you love making it better. My pasta results are gaining a fan base inside my family. Many are more than happy to be invited back for future iterations, and I’m happy to keep trying recipes. Because I love it, I don’t care that I’ll spend six hours on it only to eat it in a few minutes. The time spent is fully part of the enjoyment. How great it turns out is a function of how much of myself I invest into it.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in San Francisco. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.