Transcription
[Music] I started my product management career in 2006. Until 2018, I couldn't quite answer that question in a way that I felt confident enough. I'll share my definition of product management and what product management is. But I'll also share how I even got to that understanding.
At the time I was at Stripe, I was the fourth product manager they had hired as they were getting product management off the ground. By 2018, it was clear that product management is no longer an experiment at Stripe. It started off as an experiment. So it was very clear when I joined that, yeah, maybe if they don't like product managers and product management, I could get fired. But I was actually excited about that. So now we're 2 years in and it was very clear that Stripe was going to continue betting on product management at this point and growing the product management team.
At the same time there were many engineers and other folks across the company sales who still did not understand what product management was. Many people had tried defining product management and creating a long document like two or three page long document of here's everything a product manager does. We wrote those documents. People shipped those documents through the company. So a designer knew like what should a designer do, what should a product manager do, what should a tech lead do, what should an engineering manager do. None of those worked out. People were not quite still understanding it.
So at the time, John Collison, who's one of the co-founders of Stripe, was my manager. And I told John, "Hey, let me write a definition of what product management is." It took me a few days to write it. Um, and it was only three lines. In my view, product management is the art, science, and practice of making products successful. That's it. That's the definition of product management. It's the art, science, and practice of making products successful.
And then in terms of what a product manager does, again, I have a very clear and succinct view of what a product manager does or should do. So the product manager's job is to define the product and to coordinate or orchestrate actions across the company to make the product successful. That's it. That is the product manager's job. Okay.
So now at this point when I share this because you know we are all product managers. The first question product managers ask me is but how do you define success? So I had anticipated that question too uh which is what is product success? So product success is also very straightforward. Product success is basically some version of product adoption and customer satisfaction and revenue.
Now for any product, any single product, you don't need all three to measure product success. But for any single product, you need to have at least one of these three. You need to be measuring any product along one of these three. Usually two, sometimes all three. M I don't care what product you build, but if you're building a product and shipping it to customers, then product success is product adoption, customer satisfaction, revenue, right? So that's really the core of what product management is and what a product manager's job is.
A product manager's job is not to run SQL, even though they often run SQL queries. A product manager's job is not to write PRDs, even though they often write PRDs. A product manager's job is not to run the sprint meeting, even though they might run the sprint meeting. A product manager's job is not to write notes or send stakeholder status updates, even though they might do it. Those are all actions. And often times I find that product managers and even product leaders get too lost in the mechanics that they forget what the real job is. And that's what I like to remind people that your real job is product success.
Last thing I'll share is that this point about you know your job is to make the product successful and you do that by defining the product defining what product you're going to build and orchestrating actions across the org to make this product successful. A lot of people forget about product success and you need to have as a product manager product success really at the top of your mind because if you don't, you are going to make very different decisions and usually poor decisions about where to spend your time, where to allocate resources, how you work with different team members and also what kinds of artifacts you're responsible for.
So just to make it a little more specific, you know, I've never believed in this rigid split of a product manager must do everything in this column and nothing in this column because the things in this other column a designer should do or a program manager should do or an engineering manager should do. I've never really believed in it. You need to think about what is going to make your product successful and what the structure of your team is, what the strength of your team is. And then you need to be able to basically adapt your job in the context of your team, in the context of your company culture to make your product successful. And that might sometimes involve writing PRDs, but sometimes you might delegate most PRDs to some other people. I've done that in my career, especially as I became a senior product person. Often times my engineering counterpart wrote the PRD and that's okay. There's nothing written somewhere that like only a product manager can write PRDs and I can talk about like various other things as well that fall in this category but it goes back to your job is to identify what is going to make your product successful. Your job is to define the product properly correctly and then your job is to orchestrate the right actions. And within that you need to be very flexible on what you exactly do on a day-to-day, week to week, month to month basis.
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