Humility vs. Arrogance. Great PMs tend to be curious about the needs of others (customers, stakeholders, partners, etc.) and humble about their own work. They know that successful product management is about serving others. For example, here’s things that PMs do:
- Create products that other people use and pay for
- Specify features that other people need to design, build, market, sell, use, and support
- Define and execute on a roadmap that can have a massive impact on the financial and psychological well-being of many other people
The common theme here is “other people”. Good PMs will empathize with their users, customers, and stakeholders and will work hard to provide the best possible outcome given the constraints and tradeoffs involved.
This doesn’t mean that PMs should be pushovers or shouldn’t have opinions. PMs often have to push very hard to ensure the best outcome in the face of inertia, opposition, skepticism, or just plain apathy. PMs are often the most opinionated and vocal advocates in a company. But PMs should be (and be perceived as!) pushing hard on behalf of other people—especially your paying customers!—not as a personal crusade for self-interested reasons.
Bad PMs on the other hand:
- Think of themselves as the “CEO of the Product” with authority to boss everyone else around
- Are imperious or arrogant with colleagues and customers instead of curious and humble
- Don’t listen to contrary feedback (especially after the product ships) and don’t change course in response to feedback
- Design products they’d want to use instead of what their customers want to use
- Ignore the needs of other roles inside the company, so they specify features that are hard to build, hard to sell, hard to market, hard to support, hard to document, and/or hard for the company to make money from
- Act like their time is more valuable than everyone else’s, and are unwilling to do the boring grunt-work needed (e.g. triage 1000 bugs, read 1000 user surveys) that’s often required to keep things moving
Don’t be a bad PM!