Since you’re reading this post you know that I love the career of product management. Yes, it’s a crazy work lifestyle with highs and lows. I love talking to customers even though they can be at various times confusing, irrational, distracted, and demanding. They are also amazing, inspirational, helpful, and surprising. I enjoy doing the long, unseen, demanding work of getting the right product built which can take months and years, in order to get to that fun day of public announcement. Hearing the collective sigh of relief from customers when you solved their problems is very satisfying.

Over the last 15 years, the career role of PM has become increasingly popular. This has brought many bright and motivated young professionals to the career. As a hiring manager this is great news. Unfortunately, popularity paired with a misunderstanding of the role also brings bright and motivated people who are not a fit for the role. This can lead to job dissatisfaction and poor results. Ultimately this can also lead to early attrition. In my experience with hundreds of PMs over the years, I believe that there are some common misunderstandings of the role among many new entrants. If you are considering a career in PM, we do need great talent. It is worth your time to also understand what the role really entails before you choose to take the plunge. Below are my observations about what the job of PM is really comprised of. If you read this and decide you’re all in, I hope to see you begin an amazing career.

MYTHS VS REALITY

With popularity comes a story that becomes myth about how awesome the job of PM is. I agree that it’s a great job. I also frequently say that the job of PM is much harder than it looks. The myth describes in overly grand terms all the great parts of the role. E.g. “You’re the CEO of the product”, “You get to make important, company impacting decisions”, “You’re the product visionary”. In some ways these statements are true within boundaries, yet these statements are vastly overstated. You do get to make decisions. You do get to lead. You do get to paint a picture of the future. What you also have to do is convince teams and leaders to agree with you. They won’t always agree, and often they will try to instead impose their view of the future on you. When your plan makes contact with reality, the plan changes and pieces go flying off at great velocity. Below are some of the great misconceptions I have seen and witnessed newer PMs struggle with.

CONTROL FALLACY

New PMs will often be assigned a handful of product features to own. Ownership means you will observe and improve this feature area. If you are brand new, what you are expected to do will be outright assigned to you. You will have a goal, and be guided to deliver on some improvement. You will exercise ownership of the problem area to fully understand it and develop what is the best and most effective but minimal way to solve it. Some think that ownership means that no one else will touch or question your work. This is not true. To be successful you need to work with a team of engineers, marketing, and other PMs and build positive contribution. Positive impact and influence is far more valuable than this idea of product ownership and it will get you to success faster too.

GETTING EVERYTHING OVER PROGRESS

PMs work to get picture perfect requirements and fully understand what needs to be built to satisfy customers. They then hand those over to engineering to get the product built. The problem with that is reality. Even in stable, healthy organizations you have some small amount of silent, latent chaos that impacts everything in subtle ways. In the best of times you will never get everything you want all at once. It’s not that people in the organization want to underdeliver either. Timelines, attrition, priorities, escalations, changes in strategy, changes in leadership, unforeseen bugs, poor quality, and more are always occurring. These take scope off of your product effort. You need to hit an important date no matter what and some combination of the above happens? Get ready to decide how minimal your product delivery can be. Like it or not you will have these choices to make.

If you’ve joined PM for glory, you’ll quickly find that it’s in very short supply.

The most important thing for a PM to understand and work towards is how to make positive, meaningful progress on the product effort despite all this. You will not avoid that latent chaos. Some quarters may be easier than others, but it still exists. Even the loss of a single QA engineer can bump your project off the timeline. What? All your code was ready and tested well in unit test by core development? Your company doesn’t care. No one ships untested code to mission critical enterprise customer environments. You must figure out how to deliver the best with what you have. If something didn’t get built in time and it remains important, you can get it shipped in the next cycle. Yes, sometimes that means waiting another half a year or more.

GRIT NOT GLORY

Shipping features and announcing them internally, in press releases, at conferences, on LinkedIn, and more are very fun and satisfying. That only comprises about <1% of all of your time as a PM. Furthermore, when you do announce, you give the credit of the achievement to everyone else. And yes, this is the right thing to do.

That means the other 99% of your time is the hard work of getting the product done. In addition to the unforeseen issues above, there is also budget planning, irrational teammates, people trying to get your resources for their projects, and simple, straightforward product work. I.e. Interviewing customers, building decks, pitching your product to customers, working with engineering, UX, UI development, marketing, etc. Most of your work is generally unseen yet still critical. If you’ve joined PM for glory, you’ll quickly find that it’s in very short supply. With a multi-year run at delivering great product, trust me you will be known for being awesome and successful. You won’t get a quick turnaround on admiration for your work. If praise is your primary motivator, you might not like PM. The work comes first, and that might mean 6, 9, or 12 months before you announce anything. You will lay a lot of bricks before you see a wall emerge.

YOU CAN’T HIDE

I don’t want to make PM sound like a job without success or enjoyment. I get both in spades. An important element of PM, however, is that you can’t hide. You’ve taken a role that sits squarely between customers, partners, SEs, salespeople, engineering, and more. To use a computing analogy, you’re the message bus. When people want something, they come to you. When something doesn’t work, they go to support, until they realize it just doesn’t exist the way they want it, then they come to you. When engineering doesn’t have customer answers, they come to you. When something critical to land a deal is missing, SEs come to you. They all know who you are. You get the picture.

You may quickly realize that the demands for features quickly outweigh your time and ability to build them well. Welcome to prioritization. This means you decide when things get built, and most importantly, what not to ever build (ever). That also means that people with earnest requests just got told by you that they won’t get them soon or ever. They will not be happy with you. You will need to have good rationale, and you have to live with it. Conversely, strong conviction with solid rationale behind your choice, delivered without delay to stakeholders can actually make them appreciate you. If you deliver unwelcome news, smart people will grumble but get to move on and help their customers with alternative approaches. Maybe much later in the future, the time and situation will be right to revisit that decision. Either way, you own the decision and everyone knows who you are.

PLEASE AND THANKS MATTER MORE THAN BITS AND BYTES

This will sound squishy but here goes. Technology products usually require technically strong PMs. Though it’s not always a strict requirement, most PMs in tech companies have strong technical backgrounds in development or computer science. More important in my opinion than hard tech skills are human soft skills. You need human soft skills first, backed by hard skills in that order. I’ve met many ineffective PMs with deep technical skills. I’ve also met friendly PMs who couldn’t get anything done. This makes hiring difficult. You need both sets of skills.

What is unusual about the hiring process is that resume searches on LinkedIn or other sites start backwards with educational and job background first. This is because this is easily searchable in data. Soft skills can’t really be searched. This is where you need to assess a person during interviews. This can be thought of as fit, but fit is shorthand for likability. Effective human skills like communication, negotiation, and emotions management are more important than likability and are difficult to measure.

GET COMFORTABLE BEING UNCOMFORTABLE

All the easy problems were already solved decades ago. If you are working for a company trying to own a market, defeat a major incumbent, or fight for its life, you will have real challenges to face. If you want an easier role it’s out there, but it’s probably not product management. The hard questions don’t have easy answers. What do you do when all your choices have downsides? Which beautiful and valid product ideas do you kill because you can only execute one thing this year? How about when you simply don’t know the answer but have to figure something out in order to survive? These questions are common to founders and to larger companies too. You got hired because your company believes you can help answer the really hard questions. Being on point to handle and respond to hard questions can be uncomfortable. Even if you like this challenge, you will need to learn to be alert and vigilant while remaining perpetually somewhat uncomfortable. In fact, if you find yourself too comfortable, you’re probably missing something important.

DAILY EDUCATION

Most industries move fast in tech. To keep up, you will endlessly be Googling topics for details, competitive analysis, and news updates. Keeping up and constantly learning requires a growth mindset. I’ll be the first to admit it. It can be tiring. But it’s how the job is done. Engineers are constantly Googling for technical details, answers to coding language syntax questions, code samples, open source efforts, etc.

If this is not for you, you simply won’t have the will to do it and keep it up. As a PM, you will be asked questions you don’t now the answer to, but are expected to know. Welcome Google. You can also ask others, but you are expected to do as much searching as you can first. This is a career and a life skill.

ENERGY CONSERVATION

Being a PM is a marathon. Sometimes you sprint, and sometimes you jog. Other times you set the pace and meter your energy. Perseverance is key. Often things don’t happen as quickly as you hoped they would. You must learn how to keep the pressure consistently on without burning yourself out.

An important element of energy and emotional control is deciding when and how to fight. In this context I don’t literally mean fighting with coworkers. In the course of working however, some will agitate you, try to deprioritize your features over theirs, or simply fail to deliver. In addition to exercising influence as a first approach, sometimes you need to confront a situation. Ideally you do this professionally. Sometimes you need to escalate to a managerial level. This should also be done professionally and dispassionately with data.

Sometimes, people will try to pull you into a fight you don’t need at all. Who knows why this happens. The best action is to clearly know if something that comes to you matters to you or not. Maybe it doesn’t and it’s simply not your fight. Maybe you have nothing to win or to prove. Conserve your energy and don’t get involved in trifles. One of my colleagues likes to repeat a platitude her mother shared years ago. ‘You don’t have to go to every party you’re invited to.’ These parties also apply to conflicts. Avoid wastes of time and effort.

BECOME IMMUNE TO CRITICISM

If people find your product important enough to complain about, you will hear complaints. Conversely, if people don’t care about your product you won’t hear a thing. That’s far worse because you could be spending your career life on something meaningless. Critical feedback is a gift. You should seek it out because customers will tell you precisely what they don’t like or what they need if you ask them. As a PM you need to learn to separate product feedback from personal feedback.

Don’t take product feedback as a personal attack. If you do you may miss the learning and discovery that comes from it. Do take it professionally however. Customers are sharing because they believe they need something. They might believe you under-delivered. I’ve been in customer briefings where some customers do try to make it personal. I’ve had customers tell me just how much better a competitor is. I’ve had them pull up our stock performance chart and outright tell me our company stock would be doing better if we did x, y, or z. I’ve had them ask if the entire team is asleep at the wheel. With time and perspective you learn not to take all this personally, and get to the heart of what they really want. That’s owning the pulse of the feedback while sidestepping the emotional outburst.

SHOW UP FOR CUSTOMERS

I recently heard a PM ask how they were expected to work before 10am on a daily basis. I found this very funny for its lack of awareness. A 10am start in the tech industry is known as ‘engineering hours’. It’s often paired with a 6 or 7pm stop. The best thing about tech is the general ability to choose your own hours within reason. What is not reasonable in a PM role is to think that the world meets your hours. Unlike when I started my career in the late 90s, the world is much more highly interconnected. The large companies I have worked for in the last decade have all had offices on three continents or more. That means your colleagues are in different time zones. If your product line is global in nature, this also means your customers are in every time zone.

So what do you do when a major Wall Street bank wants to talk to you at their 9am and you’re in California? You are Zoom-ready at 6am with a smile. When a major European manufacturer wants to talk to you in their early afternoon you are alert and ready at 7am. Your schedule does not matter to a salesperson who finally got a meeting with a Fortune 100 company. I once had to do a product pitch at 4am for a Latvian company. I did it and answered questions, then went back to bed. This also applies to critical internal meetings. For example, when your team in India needs you, you have to take a 9pm call. Fortunately, this isn’t every day in most cases. You show up for your customers when they need you. You can still manage your schedule to be reasonable, but understanding your role is important to knowing when you need to show up. If you are unable to operate before 10am on a daily basis, PM is not for you.

EFFORT ORIENTATION

PMs work ahead of the rest of the organization since we’re planning for what’s next. Sometimes that’s on the order of six months to two years. We’re not the only ones who do this, but many teams work more closely to real time. PMs often get pushed and pulled between the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow. Today’s needs are decisions for engineering, feedback to UX, response to escalations, pitches to current and prospective customers, email, Slack, Teams, meetings, and more. Tomorrow’s needs are customer research, industry research, strategic planning, planning with other teams, and requirements documentation and reviews.

It is very easy to react only to the needs of today. Worse, perhaps what you’re reacting to are other peoples’ needs for today. I.e. These aren’t even the things that are important to you and your customers. If you are reactive only, you will never get what you need done for the future. This will impact your ability to be a great PM. You won’t get there. PMs must plan and work towards the future while balancing the work of today. No one will carve out your day for you, but you will get measured on your ability to do both effectively.

DETERMINING YOUR FIT FOR PM

As the message bus between customers and numerous internal teams, you will find that PM gets a ton of questions, the occasional escalation, disagreements sent your way, requests for changes, and more, while trying to do the daily job of building product and planning for next year. It’s a lot all at once and it can be pressurizing. Don’t forget the latent chaos that seems to pull the bolts out of the wings of your plane while you’re trying to bring it in for a safe landing. That door that just fell off into the Pacific Ocean during some turbulence? Maybe you can add it back on in the next sprint or two. It can be ugly, rocky, stressful, and a whole lot of fun.

If you’re deciding if it’s a career for you consider this. What is your comfort level with ambiguity? Can you manage to work with sometimes irrational and unreasonable people? Can you maintain a vision in the face of a hail storm of issues that’s breaking the windows and chipping the paint off your brand new Porsche 911? Can you maintain the determination to get the best possible product out after all of this, then line up to do it again? If you know that this is not a personality fit for you, there are many other great careers out there. If it is for you and you are excited by this, welcome to PM.

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/.