Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value

by Melissa Perri

You need to begin focusing on outcomes and to adopt an experimental mindset to eliminate the uncertainty that what you are building will reach your goals.

Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns.

Love this definition of Product Management! It takes a certain skill to be able to sift through the massive amounts of information and to identify the right questions to ask and when to ask them.

A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent. That means they can discuss enough and understand enough about the technology to talk to developers and to make trade-off decisions. They know the right questions to ask engineers to understand the complexity of certain features or improvements. A product manager doesn’t need to be able to code unless the product is highly technical and it’s essential they understand the technology deeply to make decisions.