Whatever the flavor of title, what does a product manager, by whatever name, actually do? The MBA-esque job description would be “CEO of the product,” because those B-school pukes like sporting acronymic titles. This is many a company’s definition of the role, and it’s not completely wrong, though it makes the job seem statelier than it is. A more illustrative description is “shit umbrella.” If you imagine a bursting monsoon of clumpy diarrhea pouring down like God’s own biblical vengeance, that is more or less where you find yourself in either a startup or a large, high-profile, and complex
Whatever the flavor of title, what does a product manager, by whatever name, actually do? The MBA-esque job description would be “CEO of the product,” because those B-school pukes like sporting acronymic titles. This is many a company’s definition of the role, and it’s not completely wrong, though it makes the job seem statelier than it is. A more illustrative description is “shit umbrella.” If you imagine a bursting monsoon of clumpy diarrhea pouring down like God’s own biblical vengeance, that is more or less where you find yourself in either a startup or a large, high-profile, and complex organization like Facebook. You, my dear product manager, are the communal manservant to your engineering team, holding a large, cumbersome paramerde above their heads bent over keyboards on which they furiously type. By definition, what you do is everything that needs to be done, other than hands-on-keyboard type code. So that means sitting in endless meetings with the privacy legal team, giving highly selective and edited versions of what your product is going to do, and explaining how it fits into some antediluvian legal rubric. It means pitching a roomful of smiling and empty-headed salespeople, so they can start priming the client pump and bring spend into your new product baby. It means wheeling and dealing with other PMs to either cajole a product change or cadge some engineering resource. It means fronting for the product in high-level meetings with senior management, and tryin...
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Nice description of what a product manager does in a texh company
