Still quite a loose idea. I really like being a Product Manager. I think the ethos of it is underappreciated. It gets drowned out by the corporate management bureaucracy nonsense - deadline-chasing, pencil-pushing, box-ticking bullshit. And in fairness, there certainly will be many people with this title who do the job exactly like that. In most cases, that’s probably all they were hired to do, and all that their company imagines that someone in a Product leadership role should do. But done right, properly empowered, I think a Product Manager is something quite like a Director in more traditionally creative projects. Because although it’s not creative in the artistic sense, the work of software is still to create something that didn’t exist before.
We all know from experience that editing is easier than starting from a blank page. Things that already exist can be easily imagined, and the human brain is very good at imagining small variations on things it already knows. But when the thing to be created is fundamentally new, there is a real challenge. There needs to be a vision of what to create, or at least the direction in which to attempt creation, before any creation can happen.
That’s already tough for one person to do; everyone has experienced writer’s block, or felt their mind empty of original ideas when faced with a blank canvas. When the thing to be created is going to require the skills, experience and work of many people, this becomes an enormous challenge.
I think a lot about the parable of blind men sketching an elephant. They each reach out and touch a part of something real, unable to see the whole: one feels the elephant’s flank, and draws a wall; one feels the elephant’s tail, and draws a rope; and so on. When the elephant is the goal of a creative enterprise, there are only the sketches in each persons minds, from which you will need to create an elephant. To me, the role of a Product leader is to see the whole elephant, and convey the parts of it to each contributor as clearly as if they were seeing it themselves. You dream a rich vision of what the team is going to bring into being, and inspire that same dream over and over again in the team’s members. Your crucial skills are the ability to hold such rich ideas in your mind, and to communicate them to others so they feel them just as richly.
Ironically, those skills generally do not contribute directly to the creation of your shared enterprise at all. To actually build software, you need designers, front- and back-end engineers, infrastructure and operations engineers, architects and more. However, it is asking a lot for people with incredible skills in these technical areas to also have the skills to clearly communicate a shared vision. Generally, to be great at their area of contribution, they will necessarily be passionately motivated by the technical problems in that area, more than they are by the big picture that work serves.
So in a team with only these “real” contributors, how are they to verify that they hold sketches of the same elephant? They will have to spend time talking to each other about what the thing is, constantly verifying that they’ve understood the same specific details from the high level where the project started. And this kind of communication isn’t what any of them enjoy doing - they want to be making things, not talking about them!
And so, we see the role of a true product leader emerge into necessity. You are the vessel of a shared dream. You are the keeper of the campfire in the home base of your expedition, to which your team can always return to relight their torches when they set off into the dark frontiers. You must be able to keep that dream within yourself, and pass it on freely, just as that fire can relight the torches of its adventurers whenever they call home.
That is a heinously soppy metaphor for the role. But I genuinely really believe it!