Product Answers #9: How to stay sane as a Product Manager?
I used a couple of days off to reflect on my product career over the last 15 years. Spending some days in a cottage on top of the Austrian mountains with clouds and fog all around me. Thinking of what advise I would give my younger self in hard situations that come with working in product. One major part of my personal learning over the last years was how to deal with expectations that cannot be fulfilled and working in phases where organisations loose the balance between scaling and people health.
The hard part about product management is, that if you do your job right, you always feel as if you are not doing enough. Because you do care about the needs of your users, you spend a lot of time talking to your users. Because you do care about the needs of your stakeholders, you spend a lot of time with your stakeholders. Because you do care a lot about the needs of your team, you spend a lot of time with forming a vision for your product, explaining it, giving context. Marty Cagan told me early in my career, that if a company is doing product right, the product managers are the ones who cannot walk along the floor without being chased by colleagues from various departments that want their questions answered or needs considered. They are understood as the primary go-to-person and will feel this responsibility.
First of all, you need to be aware of this. If you start working for a company that understands product management, you will always need to prioritise your time very, very hard. No matter how well you do, you will have too little time. There will always be at least one person, that is not satisfied by your performance. Usually it’s many more. That’s not a job for everyone and probably the part where most aspiring product managers loose their interest in the job.
Therefor, you need to be aware of your priorities up front. Is it your job, your partner, your family? What has the highest priority for you? Because you will always need to fight for your number one priority. Is it your job, then your family will miss you a lot. Is it your family, then people in your company will want you to stay longer in the office. If you are not clear about your priorities up front, you will always find yourself in situations where others will take this decision for you. Without deciding up front, you will realise you did not take the right decisions if you sum them up later. Will I stay longer today, will I write one more email, will I do one more call? Or will I leave, shut down my laptop and spend time with my family?
You need an owner mindset instead of an employee mindset. A company getting product right, will want people to pick up problems no matter what. They need people to think like an owner, act like an owner. Always trying to improve. Work against internal and external barriers. “It’s really hard to talk to customers” or “My boss told me differently” is not an acceptable excuse. You will need to fight to do the right thing. That’s not always fun, but it should not bring you down. Again, that is not for everyone. If you generally can’t picture yourself in that shoes, consider a different career track.
Last but not least, you can have all the topics above under control, but the company you are working for is broken. Watch out. Lots of product managers work for organisations that are not ready. They do lots of things right and still are treated like being totally wrong about it. No-one can stand this for long. It will either make you stopp doing the right thing, or break you. Assess the company before you start and leave the company if it is not able to change. Don’t spend years trying to fix a system that does not want to be fixed. You have more important things to do in the product world.
All of this is not supposed to sound harsh. Product managers will face hard situations in their careers and I want them to be prepared. The upside of working in product is working with great people on things that really matter. If the right mindset (see this article) meets the right organisation (understands product), great things can happen.