Be a Product Manager, not a Product fool!

If you don’t like being played for a fool, don’t become a Product Manager. When are we being fools? How to battle it?

Well, it’s all about the responsibility for a Product with rarely given actual ownership and accountability. Something I believe David Pereira calls “Bullshit management”. Product Managers are often mislabeled as the “CEO of Product” due to this misconception. No, the CEO of Product is just the CEO. The Product Manager is there to execute her/his vision with limited independence.

The problem arises when you are almost completely stripped of this freedom and instead are being told what to do, while still holding the perceived ownership.

I saw tons of times when Product Managers had to smile a backup, even cheer, for decisions they privately despised and strongly opposed until the very end.

I had to leave one of my most successful projects in a state of a petty MVP, as management forced me to pivot to a project that had no sense even on the conceptual level. I was never allowed to polish something that bumped main metrics by 20% even in its final form and had to waste time pushing someone else political agenda.

Ultimately both were ultimately removed from the product…