Being a great product manager takes a thorough understanding of your users, a careful analysis of your systems, and an ability to see and execute on opportunities for your market. When you go through the motions without active thinking, you end up with a lot of useless features. We rarely teach product managers how to think, and, even if we do, we don’t measure this thinking for success. Instead, we are praised for writing detailed specifications or for making sure the developers are shipping on time.
