The Life Of A Product Manager (with GIFs)
Because sometimes we just need to smile 🙃
10 “moments” you have probably experienced in your PM life. Described with the power of gifs (and some nice quotes).
#1 — When you spent weeks working on a “disruptive feature”, and nobody uses it.
“Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems. Keeping problem space and solution space separate and alternating between them, as you iteratively test and improve your hypotheses, is the best way to achieve product-market fit.”
— Dan Olsen, The Lean Product Playbook
#2 — When they tell you: “I need it yesterday!”
“The ability to de-escalate conflict and find a resolution is one of the skills that Goleman points to as a social skill and a crucial aspect of emotional intelligence.”
— Kate Leto, Manage Conflict by Building Your Product EQ
#3 — When you have been working in tech companies for years, and your friends still can’t understand what you do for a living.
“A product manager is the person who identifies the customer need and the larger business objectives that a product or feature will fulfill, articulates what success looks like for a product, and rallies a team to turn that vision into a reality.”
—Sherif Mansour, What do Product Manager do?
#4 — When you listen to customer feedback and interviews.
“Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.”
— Eric Ries, The Lean Startup
#5 — When they ask you: “I need your 3-years roadmap. With milestones.”
“You’re exploring new lands. You know where you want to get to — that’s your outcome — but there’s no established route to get there. So you’ll probably set out, and if you’re measuring yourself correctly and you’ve got good feedback loops in place, you’ll be able to course correct and quickly iterate towards your outcome.”
— Alice Newton Rex, Escape From the Feature Roadmap to Outcome-driven Development
#6 — When everything has been prioritized and the team is on track.
“Good prioritization is based on cold, hard facts. When you have data and you have a clear strategy, prioritization becomes easy.”
—Melissa Perri, Prioritization Shouldn’t Be Hard
#7 — When you thought it would be easy to say “NO” 90% of the time.
“It’s not hard to build things. It’s hard not to build things. It’s so hard to stop ourselves from getting overly excited about a potential feature.”
— Melissa Perri, What Makes a Great Product Manager?
#8— When the imposter syndrome gets you.
“Imposter Syndrome isn’t unique to product people, but we suffer from it more than most because we are generalists in a world full of specialists.”
— Martin Eriksson, Embrace Your Imposter Syndrome
#9 — When you’re finally at home.
“The product manager position is not a 9-to-5 job. I’m not saying you need to be in the office 15 hours a day, but I’m saying that there is a ton of work, and it follows you home every night.”
— Marty Cagan, Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
#10 — When they call you Project Manager, Product Owner, Project Owner, the Product guy, but not Product Manager.
“Product Owner is a role you play on a Scrum team. Product Manager is the job.”
— Melissa Perri, Product Manager vs Product Owner
If this article made you smile, or you found some useful posts or books, you might like the other one below 🤓
