What it’s like to be a new Product Manager

Tom Redman
Buffer Stories
Published in
3 min readJul 4, 2016

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Disclaimer: Since I’ve only been a PM for three months, these thoughts may turn out to be slightly, wildly or completely inaccurate.

Here are a few things I’ve learned as a new Product Manager:

I do a little of everything but not a lot of anything.

For any given project, be it a feature or product, I kick off a little customer research myself, then hand it off to somebody who’s better than me at customer development. I find the basic growth data I think is relevant, and hand it off to somebody who’s better than me at growth. I design the feature to the fringes of my ability, then hand it off to somebody who’s better than me at product design. Rinse and repeat for the technical, marketing and business disciplines as well.

As a Product Manager, I’m often not the best at any single discipline, but I try to be really good at being the glue between them, keeping the whole picture in my mind and using that mental model to encourage action in specific areas.

I am wholly responsible for the final experience.

When a customer experiences a bug in the wild, or poor UX, or limited accessibility, or nobody experiences anything at all because nobody uses the feature, the buck starts and stops with me. It is never the fault of the designer or the researcher or the engineer. Ever.

Directly related to user experience, as a PM, my expectations of quality are likely the highest on the team. This isn’t just because I desperately want to delight our users (I do), but also because — more selfishly — I will (and should) feel it the most when things go wrong. There’s at least a small aspect of self-preservation to the high level of my expectations. Fortunately, my incentives here align with our users’.

This means that getting to the level at which I’m personally happy with a project often means doing a lot of QA and very regular contact with engineering in the final days before launch.

I am constantly talking to users to make sure we’re building something they care about.

Every week I chat with existing and potential users about what we’re building in order to give me sustained confidence that we’re building the right thing. The longer I go without talking to users, the less confidence I have in what we’re building.

It’s an easy trap to think I’m building the right thing. I ask myself regularly, Do I know we’re building the right thing? This requires me to shed any ego I have around what I think is right in light of the truth, and get to the point where I can answer myself, Yes I know we’re building the right thing.

I include the team in decision making.

I work with very smart people, and try to embrace that. I encourage product conversations across the team and the company by providing context around an idea or problem or solution, and then listening to the thoughts of people who are much smarter than me. This also allows the whole team to invest early in a feature, which pays dividends later. For example, by including an engineer in the research phase, they’re empowered to make research-backed decisions during implementation, resulting in faster execution.

If everybody’s busy, I do it myself.

“It didn’t get done because we didn’t have enough resources” doesn’t ring as a great excuse in my mind. Obviously you can’t build something with nothing, but in most projects, there is usually more to do than there are resources.

As PM, part of fostering the most productive team is removing distractions, passing through signals from the noise, and minimizing context switching. The result of this filtering is that I’m left with quite a lot of small tasks that don’t pass the ‘Should I bother them with this right now?’ threshold. Of these remaining tasks, I will complete all of the ones that are within my ability. If a given task is beyond my ability, I’ll triage it for the appropriate person to get to in due time.

More to come…

I’ll share more thoughts as I experience different facets of Product Management. If you found this interesting or useful, consider hitting the green heart to help increase its visibility :) If you have any thoughts or comments, please leave them here or hit me up on Twitter, @redman.

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