Product Management is an exciting career choice in today’s world. From the outside, it is a role filled with mystery, intrigue, and mostly confusion. I will get into why product managers are different from project managers and product designers in a different post. However, this post intends to clear some product management myths.
Myth #1 - Product Managers are final decision-makers ( aka CEO of a product )
As product managers, one is accountable and responsible for the outcomes of the product, yet you are not the key decision-maker. In great product teams, the development team is more empowered than the product manager. At best, product managers build narratives around different possibilities. They use data, inputs from customers, key stakeholders, and the team to facilitate decisions. So product managers are NOT mini CEOs. One could compare them to a conductor in an orchestra, somebody who understands the goal and is trying to align bits and bobs as they go along.
Myth #2 - Product management is all about building new
This is a myth propagated by selectively reading product management literature that spends time on new products talking about product-market fit and minimal viable product. Not saying there are no such roles, you may end up building something from scratch but more often than not, you deal with products in all parts of their life cycle. You will be surprised how many products exist within a company when you get started at larger companies.
Myth #3 - The customer is always right
A sure-shot way of ruining your product strategy is to put in everything a customer asks for. They might be right but more often than not, customer pain and the product to solve that for all customers could be miles apart. It is product management's primary purpose to unearth shared customer context across customers. Do this in-depth and then iterate towards a solution. No assumptions, trust the process
Myth #4 - You need to have a specific background ( Design, Computer Science)
Product manager roles come in all hues and shades. Unfortunately, the current crop of product managers seems to have computer science degrees. Hence this myth persists. In some cases like Google and other silicon valley tech companies, there could be a computer science requirement. This is purely based on the product domain being high tech computation. In most cases, you would not need a design or computer science background. However, you do need to be genuinely curious and driven about the domain and the problems of the domain. This myth persists in pockets of PM hiring to an extent. However, this is no longer true for companies that understand product management.
Myth #5 - You need to be the creative type who has a lot of ideas on demand
Doesn’t hurt if you can contribute with your ideas but the role does not demand you have it on demand. What the role demands is you look at ideas from all places, and can pick the right ones to work on, for that specific situation. As a friend mentioned product managers are like DJ's, they get hit by request from everywhere, so you absorb it all and decide the groove. As you settle in the role you realize the source of the idea seldom matters, what matters is how you evaluate an idea and apply it to solve the customer problem at hand.
Conclusion
It is very important to realize that Products come in all shades possible. There are B2B, B2C, B2B2C, Marketplaces, Platforms, API, Data, Services, Agency, Internal tools, etc which exist in different stages of product growth, across sectors. So there does not exist a one size fits all, despite the feeling you get reading popular literature.
