Reflecting on a career in product management

It seems like there’s been a rush to the science mindset and the art part has been ignored by many in industry for the last 5-10 years.<p>I remember wanting to be a PM, but experience with the MBA-ification of the field has embittered me.<p>Seeing products (like Xamarin.Forms) systematically destroyed by focus on shallow metrics has been really sad. I remember being excited for that product to get a PM. Then the product just kept getting worse and kept stagnating. Developer interest has dropped precipitously and they haven’t managed to stay competitive with React Native or Flutter, despite having Microsoft’s resources.<p>All the time I give feedback on Visual Studio. I am a loyal customer, but I can only get “We’re closing this issue because we only prioritize problems with a broad customer impact, and you haven’t gotten enough upvotes” so many times. I’m sick of it.<p>I don’t think I’ve met a PM in the last 5 years that hasn’t made my impression of the company they work for far worse. And it comes down to focusing on business metrics and ignoring the two other sides: customer experience and interaction, and interactions with internal developer partners.<p>I don’t know why companies are only hiring and cultivating MBA-style, metrics-oriented, value-blind PMs, but the abandonment of art has made the industry worse for everyone involved.

Even if that kind of article is interesting to read, I like the science vs art part (even if I believe the art part can&#x27;t be learned). There is not much one care learn about the post. Experience is difficult to learn by another way than experiencing it.<p>I would add the list, that the biggest thing that people never understand in product management. Is that working on a B2B SMB&#x2F; B2C product vs a B2B Enterprise product needs a totally different mindset

This is really good advice.<p>Technical PM in big tech here. Going to chime in with some thoughts as I made that same transition after 5 years in engineering. And been doing it for the last 5 or so years.<p>Given that PM has two definitions:<p>Product manager - what &amp; why<p>Program manager - when, who, how<p>Some companies simply get these two disciplines mixed up or a single PM handles both(hard job). Some PMs act more like engineering managers &amp; other PMs act more like MBAs.<p>The number one way to grow as a PM? Read and embed yourself with your users &amp; product.<p>Learn from other accomplished individuals, find mentors on what works and try new things for yourself. It&#x27;s amazing to me of how many complements you may get about some strategy or tactic we used as a product team successfully that just came from a book &amp; applied to our space. Lenny&#x27;s newsletter is great too, but even books about successful &#x2F; failed products are just as helpful.<p>&gt; Don’t let gaps form between you and your customers and between you and the builders<p>This is commonly an Ivory Tower problem in which teams don&#x27;t do any customer research or get out of the building to talk to people they&#x27;re building for. It&#x27;s hard to blame them when they&#x27;ve never done it before to be successful nor have a PM who understands the value of embedding themselves in the product they&#x27;re managing.<p>&gt; People matter most<p>My personal motto for any new product or effort is to &quot;work the people, then the problem&quot;. It doesn&#x27;t matter if there&#x27;s deadlines if nobody is talking to each other or learning from the very people you&#x27;re building the product for. Once everyone is rowing in the same direction &amp; agree on a common vision, it&#x27;s smooth to execute upon it.<p>&gt; Write your resume in ten years.<p>My ten year plan when I first started in software was to become a DBA(wrote it in 2010). And that DBA dream was more close to modern data science today. The data science side of PM work is an absolute joy and fun. It&#x27;s exactly what I wanted when I wrote that 10 years ago. Oh how things have changed. Now that I&#x27;m a more senior PM, that 10 year plan has shifted to be a director and&#x2F;or running my own successful product with all the skills learned over my career.<p>&gt; The “art” of product management matters more than the “science” over the long term.<p>The art is the right brain(creativity), the science is the left brain(logic). I personally like to see this as emotions vs. facts. How you feel about something is much different than the reality of it. The art of being a good PM is by invoking emotions. How engineering feels about the backlog priority? How do users feel about an upcoming feature&#x2F;change? How do leadership feel when you present your next year plans? There&#x27;s a reason why many popular PM books are called &quot;Inspired&quot; or &quot;Empowered&quot;. It&#x27;s because of the emotion being invoked when your team is firing on all cylinders and your users are happy with your product decisions.