What Makes a Great Product Manager?

"You have to really love making things, but you have to be okay with not being the person actually making the thing." ~Ellen Chisa

• Data + Intution

  • Great product managers are able to find the right balance between data and intuition at any given moment to inform and drive their decision making. This could be something as small a bug fix, or something much larger such as which features to include in a v1 vs what to cut. The best product managers I've worked with are able to do this very well, balancing all sorts of inputs of "data" and combining it with their intuition to find the right balance of any given moment on what to index on. ~Trevin Chow

• Truth-Seeking

• Adaptable

  • Underrated skill for founders: Altitude shifting. People are often either good at high-level strategy or atomic-level execution, but rarely both. It's the ability to zoom out & paint the 5 yr vision, and then drop down into the weeds of day-to-day, & see how the two connect. ~Erik Torenberg

• First Principles

  • First principle thinking helps PMs because as companies scale, communicating the rationale behind historical, current, and future decisions can be simplified in a way that their team and stakeholders can rally around.

    This enables people around the PM to move quickly in the same direction, decouple, and make smart trade-offs without their presence. ~Brandon Chu

• Deep Understanding of the Problem

  • To me, thinking like a product manager is about problem solving. It’s about synthesizing a lot of information, understanding the system, trying to piece together what is the problem, breaking it down into small manageable chunks so you can analyze it, and then figuring out what is the right solution from there. ~Melissa Perri

• Humble and Coachable

• Evangelize

  • If you’re not sick of saying it, you probably aren’t saying it enough. Constant communication might feel like “fluff,” but it isn’t. Evangelism is a critical part of the role—and it’s your job to make sure the organization is aligned and swimming in the same direction. ~Alex Reeve

• Resourceful (The art of jugaad)

• Love of Making Things