Ask HN: What makes a good Product Manager | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What makes a good Product Manager

11 pointschairhairair10 comments

The tech PM role is… difficult to define, but we’ve all worked with good PMs and bad PMs - it’s usually quite quick to tell where someone falls on the spectrum once you’ve worked with them for a few weeks. But, I find it difficult to describe the difference.

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Walk out of one meeting and it’s obvious what to do next — priorities, tradeoffs, all make sense.

Walk out of another and it’s more meetings, more docs, and somehow less clarity than before.

"Good PM, Bad PM" from back in the day at Netscape. Recreated and posted on a16z's site by Ben Horowitz.

https://a16z.com/good-product-manager-bad-product-manager/

In the age of AI, a good PM is one who is - clear thinker and great problem solver - strategic ( execution chops is now taken care ) - Good at handling stakeholders ( this is least talked about. The industry jargon for this is high agency )

A good product manager knows the customers of the product, and can guide the team to achieve the best product he/she has in mind.

I always think Jobs is a great product manager. So is also Bill Gates back in the days when he has his hands deep into the products. These guys have visions about what products they want to make.

This resonates a lot. A good PM is almost like a feeling you can sense it quickly, but articulating exactly why is surprisingly hard. Objectively speaking, the best ones leave every meeting with crystal-clear priorities, tradeoffs, and next steps. The weaker ones tend to create more docs and more meetings, yet somehow leave the team more confused than before.

Understand your mission/output and what you are striving to solve, everything else is a sub-set which adds up to it.

You need to be interfacing with customers/users and being a good navigator because you understand the mission.

One guy once told me, top PMs are always in bed with executive, figuratively and literally.

A good PM is challenging to define because the definition is highly subjective to company culture and the collective limitations of the supporting development team.

Let’s assume the goal is to hire a PM that will transform your shitty product into world class dominance and the company is not the primary limiting constraint.

A good PM will be ambitious about product quality. It’s the hill they are willing to kill their own career on. Before new features are added the existing features must work without error as widely as possible and must execute quickly. If that means going to war with the developers then so be it. Developers not willing to achieve the quality vision of the PM are a problem to be removed. Developers do not pay the bills, sales do.

Secondly, the existing features of the product needs to achieve business results superior to the competition. This may require original technology solutions, but more often than not it will require building new business partnerships, or repairing existing ones. For example e-commerce solutions require superior inventory, better incentives, and cheaper prices.

A good PM sets ambitious numeric targets. This can include sales growth, execution speed, support costs, inventory quantity, latency, headcount size, and more. A PM will not control any of this but nonetheless knows their numbers and is willing to use this evidence to destroy all internal obstruction.

A good PM is fully aware of their products current operating state. A product is never perfect and requires periodic downtime for maintenance. A good PM is willing to work with operations to establish necessary redundancies and schedules that minimize business disruptions.

There is more, but this is a start.

crisis management is important skill for PMs

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