There is No Formula (For the Perfect Product Manager)
There is no formula to create the perfect Product Manager.
If you’re looking for the exact steps to become the next Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Chris Cox, or Sundar Pichai, you won’t find them here. Also, if you only know two of the four names from the previous sentence, don’t worry, there’s plenty of time to learn and improve your product knowledge.
What you will find in this course are three things:
1) Ideas (and plenty of them). You’ll find ideas for building stronger teams, measuring the right performance metrics, and ideas on how to take a product through the development cycle successfully.
2) Insights. I’ve distilled my experience and the collective wisdom and experiences of my colleagues across many companies into this course. Learn from their mistakes and my mistakes and find success more quickly than we did. This is the course I wish I had when I wanted to learn more about Product Management.
3) Motivation. You can be better. Every single day you should be looking to be better. The day you start feeling comfortable with where you are is the day you get stuck. The people who change the world are those who never think they are good enough. Sure, they celebrate the victories in life, but they continually set their sights higher.
So what exactly is a Product Manager?
At the most basic level, a Product Manager is responsible for a product, product group, or delivering on a strategic goal. Product Managers typically work with developers and designers to translate their product vision into discrete tasks that can deliver value to customers.
What does a typical Product Manager look like?
One of the most interesting aspects of the Product Manager position is that people with very different backgrounds can succeed in very different ways.
For that specific reason, I’d like to start by sharing some of the more common Product Manager archetypes I’ve observed.
Please note, this is by no means an exhaustive list and Product Managers come in many, many, forms.