Product Specification: Product Management for Smarties
An intro and explainer to Product Management for Smarties and this not-smart-enough-yet PM
Context
My name is Tina.
I’ve been a product manager for 6 years,1 though sometimes it feels like I’ve developed experience beyond my actual time spent in the role (which, I’m sure, is only a sign of how much more I still have left to learn).
Like every PM out there, I’m a huge nerd about being a PM. I thrive in the juxtapositions of creativity and logic, analysis and common sense, deep work and context-switching, solitary reflection and close collaboration, skies-high imagination and concrete constraints that characterize our craft.
I’m committed learning constantly not only on the job and from my peers, but also through books and theory—and not only books and theory about product management, the discipline, but books and theory in other domains, functions, and topics not related to my work. This probably sounds familiar to you, because to be a product manager is to be eternally and insatiably curious, to continually strive to do better—and your own craft is the ultimate product to optimize and improve, to multiply the value you can deliver in any context in which you find yourself.
Problem
While I’m still honing my craft and uncovering more each day about product management, technology, business, organizational dynamics, psychology, and the cold, hard facts of life, lately, it feels like my learning has slowed, and so I’m taking on the task of unblocking my own growth.
Proposed Solution
One of my mentors, like many wise mentors before him, says that teaching others is a surefire way to further your own learning.
So: I will run an experiment of
writing ≥1 time per 2 weeks
timeboxed to 6 months
on topics relating to the craft of product management - my own experiences with it, new ways I’m thinking about it, and especially cross-sections of those that I hope may be useful to someone who isn’t me.
Measures of Success
product management “stat increase”: a difficult to measure and subjective feeling that spending my time here is helping to improve my craft
meet ≥1-2 other product practitioners who teach me something new!
customer feedback from >0 product practitioners
not damaging my stress levels
Target Customers
Well, me. I am the target customer: any post should be useful first to me, so I’m not serving bland drivel designed to sell, instead of actually helping me (and hopefully us) improve.
And you. If you are an experienced product manager who has
Marty Cagan's Inspired committed to memory,
a history of leading teams to creatively deliver customer value, and
an insatiable hunger to do better still,
then I hope this is the place for you!
And if it isn’t, then let me know, so that I can recalibrate and improve, and/or change my target audience to newbie PMs.
A note on the title
Product Management for Smarties is a reference to the ___ for Dummies series, and meant to say that we have some experience already but are looking to never stop getting better.
Thanks for joining me on this journey to invalidate as quickly as possible my belief that I have experience beyond my years, and to become, together, the best product managers in the world.
Before this I was a piano teacher, patent litigation paralegal, operations/customer support associate, manual QA tester, and data analyst.