Principles of Product Management: How to Land a PM Job and Launch Your Product Career

by Peter Yang

Principle #1: Take Ownership.

Principle #2: Prioritize and Execute.

Use your weekly 1:1 with your manager to align on the top three tasks that you want to accomplish during the week. Similarly, use your weekly team meeting and daily stand-ups to align with your team on what the most important tasks are.

The majority of disagreements happen when people are not aligned on the why.

Principle #3: Start with Why.

When you get into disagreements with others, remember that your job as a product manager is to find the truth, not to be right all the time.

“How can we discover the truth together?”

Principle #4: Find the Truth.

Two-way doors are decisions that can be easily reversed, so prioritize decision speed even if you don’t have perfect information. One-way doors are rarer. These decisions are hard to change, so try to gather more information if you’re uncertain.

Every decision has two phases: 1) gather and debate; and 2) commit and execute.

it’s your job to make sure you understand the rationale behind the decision and explain that to your team. It’s never acceptable to say, “Because my boss said so.”

“Sharing the PRD early and often empowers the rest of your team to contribute ideas. I also wanted to write the perfect PRDs early in my career before I realized that collaborating with

others was the fastest way to build the best product.”

Principle #5: Be Radically Transparent.

Make your feedback about the work, not the person.

One way to measure your success as a PM is how successful your team is without you. If everyone on your team is executing well even when you’re not there, then you’re probably doing a good job.

Principle #6: Be Honest with Yourself.

What I realized through this process is that you have to think about how the work you’re doing ties back to the company’s strategic goals. You also need to share and evangelize your ideas early and often to reach alignment.

Even if I disagreed with their feedback, I still wrote it down and attempted to explain to them why we were not prioritizing their asks.

We’re all coming from a good place, wanting to build something great; if you focus on that attitude, the rest of the pieces usually fall into place.

great communication, teamwork, inclusivity, to execution skills.

my feedback with specific examples. I say something like “This happened, which caused this subsequent action, and then affected people in this way.”

positive energy. Because product management is about leading by influence,

hold themselves accountable, have high standards, and do whatever it takes to help their team succeed.

advocate for your customer, and you’ll be great!

Vision, Execution, and Leadership.

What problem are you solving for customers? How is your solution better than the customers’ alternatives? What is distinct and innovative about your approach? You have to deeply understand customer needs, question defaults, and have a beginner’s mind.

Steve Covey’s book The Speed of Trust tackles this question well. Covey provides four cores to build trust: 1) Integrity; 2) Intent; 3) Capabilities; and 4) Results.

Understand: What is the customer problem that we want to solve? Identify: What product should we build to solve the problem? Execute: What is the most efficient way to get the product shipped?

statement that answer three questions: What is the customer problem? How do we know that this problem exists? Why is it critical that we solve this problem?

Mission is why your team exists. It’s the big, audacious goal that inspires your team to succeed. Vision is what the world will look like once you make significant progress toward your mission. Strategy is how your team will achieve your mission and vision.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt wrote:2

an objective is a qualitative goal that your team wants to achieve, and key results are quantitative measures of progress toward the objective.