Gayle Laakmann McDowell Quotes
Most popular Gayle Laakmann McDowell Quotes
One reason product management is such an appealing career is you get to sit at the intersection of technology, business, and design.
Marketing folks focus on getting users into the product, while product managers define what happens once the user is in the product.
Because companies in online software collect more data, it's important that these PMs are skilled with data analysis and designing experiments.
Not trusting the engineers' estimates and promising other teams that the work will be done sooner than the engineers agree to is one of the fastest ways to ruin your relationship with the team.
PMs who like doing customer research and market analysis could enjoy working on B2B products. These are also the products where PMs tend to exert the most influence, so they can be a very satisfying place to work.
Data-driven PMs can do very well working on consumer products because they're able to make a strong case for their proposals, and they often can come up with features that will make a difference to the core metrics the company cares about.
Ask about who you'll be working with on your core and extended team. Find out how much of your time will be spent writing specs and how much you'll be working with designers. Learn where the balance is between PMs, designers, and engineers in making product decisions.
PMs who are good at project management and have good communication skills do well working on shipped software. Shipped software can also be great for people who want a good work / life balance, since there aren't usually urgent issues that need to be fixed within hours.
Prioritization is one of the product manager's most important functions at this point; if the team were to fix every bug and build every new feature idea, the product would never launch. The PM needs to consider all of the new requests and decide if they should be prioritized for the current release or punted to a later time.
Product managers are responsible for identifying problems and opportunities, picking which ones to go after, and then making sure the team comes up with great solutions, either by thinking of the solution themselves or by working with the designers and engineers. This is why product sense—having the intuition to recognize the difference between a good product and a bad product—is so important for product managers.
