Lately I’ve been preparing for an all-team, in-person PM event for my organization. My extended team attending is internationally based with people in India, Belgium, France, England, Germany, and the east and west coasts of the United States. It’s been years since we’ve all met in person at the same time. Some are newer to the company and haven’t met anyone in person yet. In preparation, my managers and I have been building a multi-day event where we will take the opportunity to build camaraderie, educate with skills training, have some fun, and converse with our PMs. I share this because in my career, explicit and developed PM training was never given. That may surprise you, but I still feel this is incredibly common.

As I’ve been developing the materials, I’ve been thinking about which one particular skill is actually the most important for PMs to possess. I.e. If you walked away with one single take-away from this event, what should it be? It’s a challenging question because PMs cover so much ground; especially as they get more senior. It’s also perilous to say that one thing is the most important for the same reason. Any one thing can be overly focused on to the detriment of the PM role at large.

Here’s the one thing: PMs must be able to get product shipped.

This is an oversimplification but it speaks to knowing how to take assignments and get them through the system and out to customers. This may sound simple to an experienced PM, but I find that it’s a real challenge for some. Shipping requires mastery, or at least functional comfort, of several parts of company machinery.

First you must know how to get started. Can you take an assignment, or a customer pain point and turn it into a concrete business defense with clean, accurate, and relevant requirements? You must be careful you’re not making up something you feel like doing and instead have something that matters to customers which they will actually pay for. You need to make a convincing argument based on facts, direct customer research, competitive analysis, and informed opinion. You can change the order of this, but always put opinion last. Your opinion doesn’t matter if you don’t have valid research and customer discovery done first. I can’t count the number of times a PM has wanted to do something based on their opinion alone. These are usually bad ideas.

Once started, you must know how to make it into the engineering work stream and through the other side with enough parts of the intended product still correct, built to spec, and in working order that customers get what they said they needed in their pain statements. This is harder than it sounds. First, how does your company actually work? In most companies engineering is already solidly booked working on prior assignments and not available for new things for perhaps half a year. What is the prioritization mechanism your company uses? How do you get your product effort prioritized? If your company is medium or large-sized, you will be competing with 5, 10, maybe 20 other PMs for engineering time. PMs with more clout, better brands, and more wins under their belt will get you edged out because they are trusted and have a track record of delivering results. They know the processes, the people, and the overall game.

I hope you didn’t forget that your product team isn’t just engineering. It also consists of UX, UI, marketing, sometimes technical marketing, sales (sometimes), QA, and if you’re lucky, a project manager.

When I was a young PM at a large company over 18 years ago, a manager of mine stated that the company we were in was a meritocracy. I believe he meant well and I think he believed it was true. Years later I believe that the myth of meritocracy is for people who are unaware of the game being played around them. Exceptional players work at a level which understands this. They can be professional and friendly at the same time, but they are super effective. They know who to pre-sell on ideas. They know who are the gatekeepers and who are the resources to line up ahead of time. They sell great ideas and get executive buy-in early. And they know how to work harder and smarter to make it a reality.

Last, even after engineering builds the thing you asked for, you still need to get it pushed out. This is more involved than getting code bits published into a public AWS repository. E.g. As a PM you aren’t directly responsible for the marketing that will get done for your product. However, the marketing team will come to you in advance for a complete breakdown of the product, features, positioning, and understanding. While you might not write the final marketing copy, you will be heavily involved.

Sales and SEs will also ask you for your direct help with positioning, explaining technical details, and putting you in front of customers. It will take far longer than you may think for field sellers to be comfortable selling your solution. They will lean on you to do it for them. You will need to help get enablement delivered (which you will probably have to build) to get you off the hook for sales calls. E.g. Intro decks, FAQs, positioning statements. If it seems like marketing should own this, see the paragraph above. Even after this, big accounts and large deals will still pull you in. Customers who write big checks want to hear from PMs directly. This is actually a good thing. Great PMs love hearing from customers and testing their assumptions.

EFFORT VS. OUTCOMES

If you’re having trouble getting past the requirements stage to getting something built, sent to customer, marketed, and adopted, you might be stuck in the effort vs. outcomes conundrum. It goes like this: Effort is necessary, but outcomes are the only things that count.

The challenge here is that effort is a critical input but you can get stuck in a cycle of ‘working on stuff’ that never results in what’s important. The trickier part is that effort feels like valuable work, and it might be useful, but without finishing and shipping, effort alone isn’t that valuable. Examples of effort without return are email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, meetings, talking to other smart people around the cubes, etc. Put another way, if you spend all day on email and Slack, but haven’t spoken to customers or moved your product forward, you haven’t tangibly gotten closer to an outcome.

Good PMs ship. Shipping can be difficult and it comes with refining your requirements, making battleground gut-wrenching compromises, pushing teams to finish on time, escalating when teams aren’t meeting their outcomes, working late now and then to get someone unblocked, revalidating an assumption, fighting off teams that want to steal your resources, and more. During the course of all of that, you will also have emails, Slack, and meetings with teams. Good PMs keep all that under control while focusing on getting their products built, shipped, and fit for market. It’s harder than it looks. It’s why exceptional PMs are worth their weight on gold.

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, cloud computing, and AI/ML. 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/.