In a product management career you’ll see and hear a mountain of assertions without data, opinions stated as facts, and artfully constructed outright lies. These are generally shortcuts to get you to do something someone wants. 

As PM, you are a gatekeeper between a mountain range of ideas and feature requests, and a narrow, single wagon passage where a small number of them get through to engineering. Many people have reasons to get you to do what they want which serve them, not you. 

Why are they beautiful? Because the world will be green, lush and serene if you believe them. Others will get what they want and you will be blissfully unaware that they may be holding you back. 

Now, PM is not a job of saying no. It’s the job of using research, strategy, intelligence and business acumen to say yes to the very small number of correct things you’ll work to build by tooth and nail. Do this right and the product grows and sells. 

Here are some of my favorite beautiful lies. For each I provide a translation of what is really being said so you can recognize and avoid them. You might not be able to avoid all of these, and you might get pressured to do some with eyes wide open.

“I need you to join an ‘Art of the Possible conversation’ with my customer.”

Translation: I have no idea how to position our product or what the customer needs. I need a PM to save my ass and lead this conversation for me. I’ll introduce you and you take it from there while I hide. 

This one is the worst of the group because it’s framed as aspirational. It’s not. It’s failure wrapped up in a pretty bow, which if you believe the BS, is framed to make you think you’re a hero. You’ll usually hear this from an account manager.

“We’re only going to borrow your engineering for a short project.”

Translation: We’re taking your resources forever. We’re telling you it’s short term so you or your manager agree. Once we have them they are ours. Don’t ask me about them again. This is usually driven from an engineering executive. 

“I need feature ‘xyz’ to close a deal with a customer.”

Translation: I can’t close a deal, and I want to make it your fault, not mine. It may be true that you’re missing a feature, and that enhancement would help sell the product. 

It’s not likely that a single feature will kill a deal, though it’s appropriate for you to hear the feedback. You will usually hear this from an account manager. 

“You’re the best person to represent our company at event xyz.”

Translation: No one else knows this product as well as you do. Our marketing team never bothered to learn this. Your time isn’t valuable to me and I have a slot to fill. This could come from all manner of organizations. If it’s an event, it’s probably from marketing. 

“We need to prioritize something else to get built first.”

Translation: I don’t care about your roadmap. Or at a minimum, my feature comes first if there is an engineering resource conflict. Even if you do hear this, a PM worth their salt finds a way to get their feature started by someone, even if you deploy an intern to do it. You will hear this one from other PM leaders who are more experienced at getting what they want than you.

“Do you have five minutes?”

Translation: I am going to waste your time for at least 38 minutes. This could have been a Slack or an email. I don’t understand the question or the answer I need so instead I’ll burn your time in a call. 

Don’t worry, when it comes time to describe this to the customer I’ll ask for your time again because I still don’t understand it. This comes from all over the organization. 

“Can I get on a call with you to understand your PM career?”

This usually comes from LinkedIn, but not always. Translation: I am looking for career advice, and you look interesting. I haven’t defined my questions, I just want to hear from someone smart with experience. I will stay on the phone as long as you let me. 

Also, I won’t follow-up with a simple expression of thanks, or follow any advice I asked you for. Young job seekers are notorious for this. I think they get taught in school to ask for virtual coffees with experts in the field. I don’t even respond to these anymore. 

“It’s a small feature.”

Translation: I need it and I have no idea how large it is and I don’t care. I know nothing about how it gets built. I also don’t realize that nothing is small when it comes to the define, build, QA, and ship cycle. 

Furthermore any time that gets spent on some bullshit, zero value add feature is time not spent on the highly strategic, revenue generating feature that propels your business forward. Again lots of people use this lie. 

“Can you explain the product positioning, the competitive positioning, and the messaging for this feature or product.”

Translation: You can do it more easily than I can, I don’t want to do it, so I’d love it if you handled it for me. Marketing and competitive teams should own these. The truth is, great PMs can do these things with one hand tied behind their back. That doesn’t make it their job or a good use of their time. 

“Everyone needs this feature.” 

Translation: I want this feature. Whenever you hear this, rest assured, the speaker has no idea who needs it or why. Maybe one person complained and they still don’t know if it matters or not to a sale. 

When someone, including another PM, can’t qualify with data or a specific set of anecdotes from named companies and people, they are expressing an opinion. If you don’t ask for details or tell them to go pound sand, you will get stuck building some BS that no one wants, with zero success criteria. 

“The feature is on-time for the release.” 

Translation: This is what I want you to hear, to stop asking me for the details of engineering progress. This one is one of my favorites because it’s hard for you to validate its veracity. If engineering tells you this, and you have a great track record with this team, you can trust it. If they have a poor track record, you can’t trust it. 

The cost of failing to ship in a release rarely falls on engineering. It falls on you the product manager, who has to tell customers and executives why you (yes, you) failed to get it released on time. You often hear this from engineering. You might also hear it from project managers. 

“You need a computer science degree, or a MBA, to be considered for this PM job.”

Translation: We’re not about to train you to do this job so you must hit the ground running. This one isn’t always a lie, but this level of qualification is probably overinflated. 

It may mean, we don’t want to hire people with no technical background or business skills for this job. If you’re a beginner PM you should start somewhere else. 

This can also mean, I don’t really know what this job needs so instead we’ll just list a bunch of degrees as prerequisites. Managers who don’t know what they really need use these catch-all certification criteria. 

If you over-hire, but fail to give this employee challenging work, they will be gone in a year. I once left a misrepresented dead end job in four months, after two months of searching.

“Yes, I’d buy that.” 

Translation: A customer can say whatever they want to be agreeable or get you to stop pitching your product with zero intent of following through. This one is fun because most PMs have never been salespeople. When you are researching and doing customer discovery, you are looking for pain points in order to solve the right problem. 

You’re also looking for signal of interest and propensity to buy as a prioritization input. If a customer tells you they’d buy or adopt your product if you just added feature xyz, you can’t take much stock in this beyond a mild signal of interest. This is because someone who hasn’t given you any money can say anything they want with impunity. 

Until you see the money in your company’s bank account, i.e. a PO has arrived, any statements of interest are not bankable. Therefore, it’s easy for you a PM to over weight the idea that this feature will have great outcomes. Instead, keep getting strong measures on the level of pain more customers have. Solving real pain will get you to product adoption. 

MORE LIES, THIS TIME FROM YOU

Let’s be honest. We lie sometimes too. Here are a few lies you will tell others as a PM. I know you’re not a bad person. Sometimes we say things to protect ourselves. 

“I’ve added your product request to the JIRA backlog.”

Translation: Ok maybe I did, but this will never see the light of day. I have 10,000 other JIRA tickets already. If I’m lucky I can get 20 of them built this year. In reality I’ll get 11 built. Your idea will wallow in digital hell because it’s not fully formed, I’ve never heard a single customer ask for it, and it doesn’t fit our product strategy. 

“Here’s a link or a document explaining your question.”

Translation: The answer you want is probably truly in that document. I’m not evil. I know you probably won’t read it though. I just want you to go away. Going into more detail is a waste of time. See, “Do you have five minutes?” above.

“I didn’t see your question.” 

Translation: I ignored your question. In a world where you’re inundated hourly with questions from email, Slack, web forms, drive by questions and more, great PMs must self-enforce time for focus and real work. It’s easy to get sideswiped by someone who doesn’t respect your time and doesn’t want to do a simple email or Slack search. 

Instead they just throw a question over the wall to you. After all, if you answer it, they get what they want, and you get 10 minutes or more of wasted, duplicate effort because you’re already answered this 100 times in the past quarter. When you see low-quality questions, let them slide by. Someone else will answer them for you. 

SELF-PRESERVATION

The task list for PM is unending. Don’t get sidetracked on fools’ errands. While the job requires great focus to be successful, you will effectively say no to the things that waste your time and don’t contribute to the best possible product you can deliver. 

Being the best possible PM isn’t making everyone around you happy all the time. It’s getting the best possible product built and shipped. When the product sells, people will be happy, and so will you.

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 Generative AI. 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/.