Decisions and the Career of Product Managers
Making decisions in the face of uncertainty is the essence of product management. Here's how decision-making challenges evolve throughout your PM career.
You're leading a large product and your customers are expecting a major feature which will take roughly six months to complete. However, one of your most important customers has discovered a defect. When this defect occurs it causes a serious problem leading the product to crash. Your challenge is that this defect is in some poorly architected code and to fix would cause you to not deliver the major feature. What do you do?
This is one of my favorite interview questions for new product managers. It is the essence of the hardest part of our job. Making a decision on which there will be consequences.
Interestingly enough, this challenge starts on day one of your first product management job and continues throughout your career.
Early Career Product Manager
In the beginning, it may be something small like deciding between doing this enhancement or this other enhancement. The consequences of this decisions may be something that can easily be fixed in an upcoming sprint, but ultimately it's a hard thing to do at this point in a PM's career as you will be responsible for that decision.
As a new product manager, this period of your career development will serve as the foundation for your career progression. This is the time to get comfortable making decisions in the face of uncertainty and making them in a timely manner.
Experienced Product Manager or Product Line Manager
After some time as a new product manager, you'll get to own the full product (or in smaller companies have gained the trust of the owners to make the decisions). At this point, the decisions become a bit bigger and similar in scope to the interview question I started with.
As your career progresses, you may take the tract of leading a couple of similar products and a few product managers. At this point, your decisions may not be at the level of enhancement A vs. enhancement B, but could be more around do more of Product A vs. Product B.
As an experienced product management leader, this is the time to really get good at understanding and influencing strategy if you haven't already. You'll need to start understanding the balance between what your customers and field may be saying and where the broader market is going. You may not be making strategic decisions at this point, but you'll be exposed to them and it's important to be able to get comfortable with that scope.
Product Management Executive
You lead a significant business. It's what many product managers aspire to do. Interestingly enough, you're still making decisions here, but the decisions are bigger in scope and broader in impact. One of the first big decisions you'll have to make is to define the strategy of your business. Where will your business be in three years, what's its beliefs and what are its value? As a good product manager, this should be fairly easy; you've been doing it for a while. The hard part comes into implementing that strategy across an organization.
Why is implementing a strategy for a business challenging? It's because you'll need to make decisions that are broad in scope. They can be everything from setting an organizational structure, to setting investment levels, to deciding to enter or exit businesses. As if making big decisions isn't challenging enough, when you're at the executive level the consequences of those decisions may not always be immediately apparent. Why not? They won't be apparent because you'll have to rely on other product managers to make decisions that align to that direction. Personally, I admire one thing in seasoned product management executives. I admire the product manager who can make a timely decisions, bear the consequences, and empower their people to deliver.
As much as the decisions we as product management professionals make change over the course of our career; the ability to make decisions quickly is one of the most valuable traits acquire and cultivate.