Member-only story
What People Don’t Tell You About Product Management
How to Be a Successful Product Manager
I’ve flipped from founder (Ridejoy) to product manager (Etsy) to founder again (I’m one week into something new). Being good at one is not the same as being good at the other.
Product Management is a great job if you like being involved in all aspects of a product — but it’s not a great job if you want to feel like a CEO.
Below are what research and my own in-the-trenches experience taught me about excelling as a Product Manager.
Why Product Management Was Invented and Why This Job Matters
The role of product manager stems back to the 1930s, when an executive at Procter and Gamble created a new role he wanted to hire for, one that would try to channel the needs of the customer, and follow a product from conception, through development, to launch, and beyond. The goal was to have a cross-functional leader coordinating between R&D, Sales, Marketing, Manufacturing, and Operations.
That Procter executive, Neil McElroy, took the product manager idea to NASA and later Stanford, where he advised two young entrepreneurs, Bill Hewlett and David Packard, which led HP to adopt the product manager role as well.
On a parallel track, up in Washington, Microsoft also played an important role in the conception of the modern product manager role. What Microsoft found in the 1980s building Excel for the Mac was that the project was a significant technical challenge. That challenge: building a spreadsheet tool that leveraged new GUI elements on an operating system they weren’t familiar with and didn’t control.
That challenge led the engineering team into the weeds. It was all they could handle to get the details right, and that pulled their attention away from bigger-picture issues.
Here’s how former PM Scott Berkun describes one of the first product managers at Microsoft.
A wise man named Jabe Blumenthal realized that there could be a special job where an individual would be involved with these two functions, playing a role of both leadership and coordination. He’d be involved in the project from day one of planning, all the…
