PM102: The classic lies in product management

eesel.app

5 pointsamoghs2 comments

These are all good points, but many of them feel like straw-man arguments for any experienced product manager.

Of course we’re not going to ship a product that’s so bad it’s embarrassing just because a Reid Hoffman aphorism told us to.

Maybe the real problem is the overwhelming amount of feel-good hyperbole in the product management literature. Many of the product management books, blogs, and Tweets I read skip right past the pragmatism and try to frame their advice as earth-shattering contrarian revelations. That’s how we go from reasonable advice like “don’t let perfectionism get in the way of shipping a good enough product” to punchy sound bites like “ship when your product is embarrassingly bad!”

I agree that a few points seem 'matter of fact' at face value. What's weird is that IMO even people that would see this to be obvious, sometimes behave counter to it. For example, I've seen good teams release things that pretty much anyone could classify as 'broken' from the outset, but they do it anyway because there's an overarching 'hustle obsession' and aphorisms like "ship to learn" make it easy to justify that. It's probably a mix of flawed incentives, company culture (glorification of failure?), and so on, but my point there is that in the weeds, it can be hard to put even the simplest rules in practice, with nuance.

I totally agree re books, blogs, tweets. Categorical statements are easier to remember and digest, nuance is kind of boring to talk about (read: politics atm, or always?). Maybe it's something about human psychology that we are collectively drawn to the simpler, discrete answers because they feel more comforting and approachable.

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