Product Management in Practice: A Practical, Tactical Guide for Your First Day and Every Day After

by Matt Lemay

“Just get this book, OK? From start to finish it teaches hard-won lessons from the real-world challenges facing product people today, remote or in person. If you make products for a living, the answers you’ve been looking for throughout your career are here waiting for you.” Scott Berkun, Author of Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation

I could answer the questions being asked—but I was much more excited to discover and solve for what I saw as a major fault line in our experience. The support team was an important source of validation because they were the first line of defense with our customers and could connect customer feedback to this issue. I wanted to talk about why this would be a great win for our customers and, in turn, for our business. However, the prevailing definition of a good product manager was someone who could socialize a fresh and clean financial model with a company-centric BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal).

Product management is a challenging job because it can look different from company to company. It’s certainly looked different over my career. Two companies ago, an analytical product manager was highly valued—we had targets we needed to hit, and leadership favored product managers who knew how to create “big rock” ideas with financial models that neatly laddered up topline sales goals. My last company valued relationship development and saw the team as a unit that was led by the product/design/engineering triad. Being able to develop a product-led growth strategy will be an important measure for my next company.

There are, however, universal truths in product management that you will experience across any digital organization. Product managers don’t make the product but are accountable for it, from release to results. Product managers work with research and analytics to develop a vision, and they must socialize that vision with everyon...

This role requires chutzpah. And patience. And humility. And resilience. The job is challenging but so rewarding. It’s such a great feeling to see your product launch, especially when you can validate your idea as quickly as possible. You get to work across the company with all levels of the organization. You get to talk with customers and partners in co-creating product with the team. Product management can b...

Building product is not a heroic mission—which can be tough for people who seek status and recognition. Many people enter the field thinking that they will be the “mini-CEO” of the product, or that their job is to tell other people what to do. Others, like the product managers I once admired, poke holes in other people’s ideas rather than working with them to make those ideas better.

With humor and generosity, Matt LeMay breaks down what actually makes a good product manager (communication, collaboration, learning from users) and what actually makes a bad product manager (defensiveness, arrogance, sucking up to executives). More than anything else I’ve read about product management, Product Management in Practice speaks to the messy reality of our work, beyond catchy acronyms and oversimplified frameworks.

I believe that we have the opportunity to reclaim some of the joy of product management. For there is a tremendous upside in the irresolvable ambiguity of this role and the irreducible complexity of this world: there are always new things to learn, new stories to share, new situations to navigate, new mistakes to make, new frustrations to work through, new depths of resilience and adaptability to find in ourselves and each other. Here’s to whatever comes next.

Product management in theory is very different from product management in practice. In theory, product management is about building products that people love. In practice, product management often means fighting for incremental improvements on products that are facing much more fundamental challenges. In theory, product management is about triangulating business goals with user needs. In practice, product management often means pushing relentlessly to get any kind of clarity about what the business’s “goals” actually are. In theory, product management is a masterfully played game of chess. In practice, product management often feels like a hundred simultaneous games of checkers.

Product management is a uniquely connective role, requiring its practitioners to bridge user needs with business goals, technical viability with user experience, and vision with execution. The connective nature of product management means that the role will look very different depending on the people, perspectives, and roles that you are connecting.

Successful product management is much less a question of titles, tools, or processes than it is of practice. I use this word the same way one might refer to a yoga practice or a meditation practice—it is something that is built up with time and experience and cannot be learned from examples and instructions alone.

For folks who are more experienced in the practice of product management, I hope that this book will provide guidance for working through the challenges and roadblocks that somehow seem to keep presenting themselves time after time, year after year. And for everybody else, I hope this book will help you understand why the product managers in your life are so stressed out all the time—but really good to have around when you’re trying to make a plan or solve a problem.

In practice, product management often feels more like a series of interrelated novellas than it does a neatly organized textbook.

Like horizons with features building on features that enable future products get built at the right time, with the right quality, for the right customer segment fit with the least amount of resources. Peeking into different horizons and building things now that enable more strategic things happen later, all while taking and prioritizing customer facing feedback from the mass of customers, and some of your most strategic customers.

The goal of this book is not to address the specific tools you might choose in your product management practice but rather to help you build a practice that can effectively incorporate whatever tools you encounter along the way.

There’s often a knowing, conspiratorial tone to conversations shared between working product managers—like we’re all in on the same secret. That secret, for those of you who are wondering, is that our job is widely misunderstood and really, really, really hard. Product managers are much more likely to share “war stories” than “best practices” and are more likely to talk about the mistakes they’ve made than the meteoric successes they’ve achieved.

As you will see, most of these stories are about people—not frameworks, tools, or methodologies. Several of the product managers I spoke to provided multiple stories that, taken together, paint a more comprehensive picture of the distinct but related challenges a product manager is likely to encounter over the course of their career.

Thanks to every product manager who shared their stories with me. And, special thanks to those who helped me streamline the process of gathering these stories. (Product managers, amirite?)

Book as a product?

I recently asked Pradeep GanapathyRaj, VP of product at Sinch and former head of product management at Yammer, what he wished that every new product management hire understood about their responsibilities. Here are his answers:

Bring out the best in the people on your team.

Work with people outside of your immediate team, who are not directly incenti...

Deal with amb...

“The skill of actually figuring out what you need is probably as important as what you do after you figure it out.”

Many people are drawn to product management by the promise of “building products that people love.” And, sure enough, delivering products that provide real value to real people is one of the most important (and rewarding!) aspects of product management. But the day-to-day work of delivering those products usually involves less building than it does communicating, supporting, and facilitating. No matter how much expertise a product manager might have in software development, data analytics, or go-to-market strategy, their success can only be realized through the shared efforts of the people around them—people who each carry their own complex and oft-inscrutable needs, ambitions, doubts, and limitations.

product managers as the stewards of a value exchange between a business and its customers.

if you are working as a product manager, you will probably find yourself doing lots of different things at different times—and what exactly those things are can change at a moment’s notice. However, there are a few consistent themes that unite the work of product management across job titles, industries, business models, and company sizes:

You have lots of responsibility but little authority.

If it needs to get done, it’s part of your job.

You are in the middle.

Product management can be many different things, but it is not everything. Here are a few consistent—and for some people, consistently disappointing—realities of what product management is not:

You are not the boss.

You are not actually building the product yourself.

You can’t wait around until somebody tells you what to do.

It is your job to identify, evaluate, prioritize, and address anything that might affect your team’s ability to deliver on its goals—whether or not you’re explicitly told to do so.

Some organizations are well-known for favoring a certain profile among product management candidates. Amazon, for example, has historically preferred MBAs. Google, on the other hand, has been known for preferring candidates with a computer science degree from Stanford. (The extent to which either of these companies still harbors these preferences is the subject of frequent debate.) Generally speaking, the “classic” profile for a product manager is either a technical person with some business savvy, or a business-savvy person who will not annoy the hell out of developers.

The truth is, great product managers can come from anywhere. Some of the best product managers I’ve met have backgrounds in music, politics, nonprofits, theater, marketing—you name it. They are people who like to solve interesting problems, learn new things, and work with smart people.

Great product managers are the sum of their experiences, the challenges they’ve faced, and the people they’ve worked with. They are constantly evolving and adapting their own practice to meet the specific needs of their current team and organization. They are humble enough to recognize that there will always be new things to learn and curious enough to constantly learn new things from the people around them.

When I consult with organizations that are looking to identify internal candidates for PM roles, I often ask a few people to draw out a diagram of how information travels within the company—not a formal org chart, just an informal sketch of how people communicate with each other. Without fail, a few people continuously show up smack in the middle. These people are the information brokers, the connectors, the expansive thinkers who are actively seeking out new perspectives. They rarely fit the “traditional” profile of a product manager, and, in many cases, they are entirely nontechnical. But these are the peop...

Although great product managers rarely fit a single profile, bad product managers are quite consistent. There are some bad product manager archetypes that seem to show up in nearly every kind of organization:

The Jargon Jockey

The Steve Jobs Acolyte

The Hero Product Manager

The Overachiever

The Product Martyr

These patterns are shockingly easy to fall into—I’ve definitely fallen into all of them at one point or another in my career. Why? Because by and large they are driven not by malice or incompetence but by insecurity. Product management can be a brutal and relentless trigger for insecurity, and insecurity can bring out the worst in all of us.

Because product management is a connective and facilitative role, the actual value product managers bring to the table can be very difficult to quantify. Your developer wrote 10,000 lines of code. Your designer created a tactile, visual universe that wowed everybody in the room. Your CEO is the visionary who led the team to success. Just what did you do, exactly?

This question—and the urge to defensively demonstrate value—can lead to some epic acts of unintentional self-sabotage. Insecure product managers might begin speaking in gibberish to prove that product management is a real thing that is really complicated and important (the Jargon Jockey). They might (and often do) lead their teams down a path of exhaustion and burnout just to prove how much stuff they did (the Overachiever). They might even start to make big, awk...

For product managers, the value you create will be largely manifest in ...

Anybody who has done the hard work of learning to set boundaries and prioritize their time will be, and should be, put off by the idea that any job will require them to work an unreasonable and unhealthy number of hours. And the field of product management desperately needs more people who have done the hard work of learning to set boundaries and prioritize their time.

Nearly every time I teach a workshop about product management, the first question I get asked is some version of “What’s the difference between a product manager and a (program manager/product owner/solution manager/project manager)?”

“Well, in most situations, the product manager is the person who’s accountable for the business outcomes the team delivers, and the product owner is the person who’s in charge of managing the team’s day-to-day activities.”