Product Management isn't a profession
It's a job, not a way of life.
This edition of Rough Terrain is brought to you by Cometeer Coffee.
lol, not really, they don’t sponsor me. But their coffee is a-maz-ing. I’ve been a Kirkland Signature coffee guy for years because to me coffee had always been a tax, not a pleasure. That’s no longer true thanks to Cometeer. And now that my wife has discovered it, I’ve had to really bump up my subscription quantity.
If you drink coffee, odds are you drink a lot of it. So you should invest in making sure such a highly consumed substance is grade A quality vs. the cheap stuff. Doing some quick napkin math, if I drink 2 cups a day every day, that’s 728 cups a year. Round up to 1000 for those occasional 3-cup-days (typically following nights featuring margaritas). That’s a lot of hot bean water. Do I really want to put 1000 cups of junk into me? Or 1000 cups of awesome?
Instead of suffering through my coffee or killing it with creamers, I now savor it. Game changing. Grab some Cometeer. You’ll get $25 off your first order, and I’ll get $25 of my next one too. That scratching sound you hear is our respective backs.
PS - Hey Cometeer, pay me! You’ll find my rates for being a corporate shill quite reasonable
Rapid Fire
Quick things of interest to me and (hopefully) you:
After last episode’s bitching about Excel, I was sent an interesting potential solution, Kubera. Haven’t checked it out since it’s $150! But if anyone else wants to kick the tires, they offer a $100 discount to both yours and your referred friend’s accounts, so that $150 becomes $50. Any takers? Hit me up!
Taskforce Pineapple. Trustworthy news out of Afghanistan is hard to get right now, but if even half of what I’m reading about TF Pineapple is true, get ready for at least 5 books and 3 movies. I am so god damn proud of my brothers and ashamed that I’m not over there. The best I’ve done is help liaise between some parties looking for assistance. De Oppresso Liber.
Polywork. LinkedIn is a dumpster fire and I hope Polywork is successful in their mission of disrupting it. Sign up and connect with me!
Deep Thoughts From Me:
Roy Kent is my spirit animal
Product Management Musings
As a product manager, there are some things about the product management community that bugs me. The job is overly fetishized. Even after rightful backlash to the moronic assertion that PMs are “mini-CEOs”, there’s still a lot of heavy mouth breathing when folks talk about becoming a PM. I’m not a contrarian by trade, but I will poke some of the not-so-sacred cows my community has. Dedication to a craft is great, but some are taking it too far and doing unnecessary gatekeeping.
Product management is a critical role for any tech company so of course only the best people are wanted in the job. Because of the job’s nature, you’re at the nexus between technology and business, drinking from the fire hose while trying to keep the wolves at bay. Those that excel at it can use their experience as a great springboard to advance their career. There’s a lot of folks who have done product well and then went on to found great companies or be big time executives. So it tracks the product management is a popular role.
Naturally, when something is popular, an ecosystem gets created. There is so much good stuff out there for PMs. From learning how to get your first gig, how to advance up the product ladder, etc. I love soaking up the knowledge of great product thought leaders like Marty Cagan, Melissa Perri, Shreyas Doshi, Gibson Biddle, Teresa Torres, and more. Seriously, check my twitter feed, it’s 50% product leadership, 50% dank memes, 50% tech bro virtue signaling.
Don’t worry, that math checks out.
The role is important and popular, so another natural phenomenon is the community’s effort to improve standards. There are courses, college degrees, and other infrastructure that is supposed to help separate the wheat from the chaff. Nobody wants a bad a PM in their company, so it’s tempting to look for merit badges on a candidate’s resume that de-risk their application. This can work, but it can also be a red herring. And the impact on the PM community is getting toxic.
I see people trying to smush the job of product management into a structure that it won’t fit into. Rightly or wrongly, some want to force the square peg of product management into some round holes.
One of those round holes is believing product management is a profession.
Product Management is not a profession
I said profession. Not to be confused with being professional. Every PM should be professional. But product management is not a profession.
A profession is a protected class. A profession provides a service that society otherwise could not. Entrance into a profession is rigorous with strict standards that must be met and a high bar to enter. A profession policies itself, maintaining an ethical code, and expels those who fail to adhere. It’s (generally) a long commitment to be a part of a profession.
Doctors. Lawyers. Officers (both commissioned and non-commissioned) of the military. These are professions.
Professions are not professions simply because they say they are. Their clients, society as a whole, have to accept their claims and trust the professions with jurisdiction over important areas of human endeavor.
-Colonel Matthew Moten
Product Management is not a profession. There is no guild. We don’t do exams or require continued education. There is no sworn oath. I know there are some in the PM community that wish we had these things, but that’s not the case.
Does a good PM constantly seek improvement at their job’s core competencies? Of course! But that’s an innate desire to learn that anyone who wants to be great embodies.
Do bad PMs get the removed from their job? Perhaps locally, from their org or from their company. But there’s no organization that ensures that a bad PM doesn’t ever become a PM again.
Do you have to pass an exam to become a PM? No. Well, maybe a whiteboard exercise, but those are of questionable value. And hardly standardized.
My point here is that product management is a job. Just that. A job. An important one, no doubt. Some people find their life’s passion as a PM and the rest of us are all the better for it. We could all use more Marty Cagan in our lives. Seriously, I could read about him taking a dump on MBAs every day and not get tired of it.
But what we in the Product community need to do is worry less about keeping the gates closed and more about improving ourselves.
You’re not a PM for life. Go do other things. Then come back, you’ll be a better PM as a result!
That applicant to your open role that hasn’t been a PM before? Give them 30 minutes of your time to find out if they have the fundamental characteristics of a good PM. There’s many roads to Rome (this will be a future blog post).
Don’t act like product management is a guild that you have to join right out of college and can’t leave. If you got into product at an early age, awesome, stick with it until something else tickles your fancy.
But let’s not sell ourselves a story that there’s only one way to become a PM or only one way to rise through the ranks of product management.
Gate’s open y’all, come on in.
Love it!