I remember my first day as a product manager in Google. In my fantasy, I saw a panel of execs in expensive suits sitting in a fancy mahogany boardroom with shiny leather seats as they ordain me with the keys to the corporate kingdom. After all, isn’t the PM a CEO of a product ?
Reality was different: the day after I joined the team my manager had to fly to Vegas for a 4-day weekend conference with the entire enterprise sales team. Her team was announcing 3 new products at this conference and there were higher priority items on her TODO list than onboarding a junior Product Manager.
Instead of the scheduled meeting, she pinged me apologetically over the internal chat: “Sorry I can’t make our first 1:1. TLDR: we need to launch something soon in the GSuite security space to make us more enterprise mature. I trust you can figure it out 😬. You’re a Google PM after all, haha. Let’s connect in a couple of weeks when you have some concrete ideas.”
Figuring it out took me on a path. After spending many moons observing the organization around me and trying to understand how can I actually influence without authority, I came to the interim conclusion that Product Management is like a pile of fishhooks. You cannot lift one of them without affecting the others.
Engineering team wanted to launch something to show progress. UX team was worried that the users’ needs were not addressed. Executives wanted to see how fast competitive gaps can be closed. Program managers kept developing new processes and beautifully structured tracker docs helping us remain accountable according to the latest Agile methodology. It seemed all fluid, mixed-up, interconnected. I was confused and disoriented. On some days I was ready to throw in the towel and I questioned whether I had in me what it took to be a Google PM.
The tipping point was when the designers set up a meeting to discuss whether we are going to use material design vs. flat design as the UI paradigm for the new product. It wasn’t clear to me what we are doing and why. So why did it matter how the UI looked like ?
Every time I was running into a deadend, I resorted to a secret weapon: my tried and tested mentor Erkan who was leading a large product division and has seen most of what exists under the sun in the product world.
I spent most of my time with Erkan complaining about my woes as a cat herder. He responded by looking at me with a disarming, mysterious smile and said: “it is actually very simple. There are only two questions you need to answer. The rest is mechanics”.
Question #1: what is currently the most important decision you need to help your team make ?
Question #2: what information is needed to make this decision ?
Once there is clarity on these two pieces, the rest becomes tactical: in the context of a large tech company like Google or Facebook you will be gathering and analyzing data, creating prioritization frameworks, socializing your approach with stakeholders and building support towards a consensus. While tactics are important, they vary depending on your operating environment.
I found it soothing knowing that the complexity of any infinitely messy situation can be boiled down to two simple questions making the rest a mechanical sequence.
Early in my career I compared Product Management to a pile of fishhooks. Over time, I evolved my mental toolkit to include more useful and inspiring metaphors. One that I find especially relevant is transforming oceans into pools. A PM is someone who can take an ocean of uncertainty, an unstructured pile of conflicting customer desires and vague requirements and transform it into a concrete pool with clearly specified length, width, depth, color code for the tiles and a specified chlorine concentration. This requires skill, tact and a lot of empathy to the people involved.
Calling a PM the CEO of a product is highly inaccurate. The CEO has the ultimate decision authority within a company. A product manager is by definition all about influence without authority. In addition, calling yourself the CEO of a product might create inflammatory dynamics with individual team members especially if you are new to the team and haven’t established enough political capital or earned your wings.
Having said that, both the CEO and the PM are tasked with an important mission: serving their teams by helping them focus and make decisions. Decisions is what drives progress and propels organizations towards their goals.
The word decision comes from the Latin meaning to cut off: by making decisions you are cutting off other possibilities thus reducing the number of unknowns and obtaining clarity of focus.
Understanding how decisions are made by organizations can be extremely impactful. For more than a decade I’ve obsessed to gain insight into how big Tech Firms make decisions around hiring, promotion, compensation planning, investing and resource allocation. What I learned got me results. It got me promoted 5 times in 6 years, enabled me to launch major products with planetary scale and significantly grew my income. I share everything I learned through my coaching and the artesanal programs I have created for aspiring product managers.
If this resonates with you, pause. Take 5 minutes and ask yourself: what decision in your life, if resolved, would add significant clarity to your life ? And then, what is the information you need to make it ? Notice that once you answer these two, the rest becomes mechanical.
If you want to learn more about effective decision making in the context of building technology products, consider joining me in Product Ninja: a 30 day program where I coach students through building a digital product from scratch. Find out more here.
My motto is 0 fluff. Let’s build some product together.
Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Do you agree ? Disagree ? I’m genuinely interested and I carefully read every response.
Arie Meir
