7 Unspoken Truths: Why Great Product Managers Build Businesses, Not Just Products

I have been thinking a lot about my experiences in product management, from lessons learned the hard way to observing other product managers. I have decided to start a series on the 7 truths of product management. I will tackle each of these as separate posts, but let’s start with the first truth:

Product Managers must be a Jack of All Trades, Master of Some

I can remember when I first started in Product; I leaned toward the technical side of the house. While some stereotypes paint product managers as technical wizards, I quickly learned that being a good PM meant understanding all aspects of the business.

This technical acumen is important because it gives you the empathy you need to ensure that teams like support, engineering, and operations are taken care of. Importantly, it helps us understand the art of “technically possible,” which is challenging if you have never been technical in your career.

🤝 Even though we are not on the front lines selling, I needed to understand the Sales Team’s perspectives so that when I designed a product, it was as easy to sell as possible from a packaging point of view. Eventually, we need to understand our sales channels and ensure we are targeting each of our channels properly. At times, we are called to be on the front lines with sales, which is invaluable as a Product person because this gets you customer reactions, needs, and wants firsthand, while also understanding what the sales team is really going through.

✴ This goes hand in hand with Marketing. Maybe I was not responsible for creating customer-facing content, but I needed to understand the value prop so that we could arm our marketing and sales efforts properly. Whether this was for collateral, marketing motions, blogs, webinars, or analyst reports, properly positioning the product is crucial.

💲 Then there is Finance. I happen to have a degree in finance, but it was never my primary focus in my career. As product managers, we must know how to create financial business cases, ensure our costs are in line, drive them down as needed, and make sure that our pricing is sustainable in the market. And of course, we have to sell that financial business case up the chain.

The list could go on and on, and the importance of understanding each function would be even longer, but any valuable PM knows that they should be the center of their product’s universe and have the knowledge, curiosity, and interest to ensure every aspect of their product meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Stay tuned for the next post, where I talk about empathy!