I came across a Twitter thread authored by Ken Norton, a former Google Product Manager who coaches and writes about product management, this morning. The thread explores a sentiment that I\u2019ve been feeling quite a lot recently, with an exciting proposal to actually enact something I\u2019ve been telling my friends and peers that I\u2019ve been wanting. I started to reply on the Twitter thread before realizing that I had more words to say, so I figured I\u2019d share my thoughts here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m a Senior Product Manager at AWS. I\u2019ve been here for about three months, and before joining Amazon, I was a Staff Product Manager at Mozilla (Staff is above Senior at Mozilla, but job titles are weird and made up). For the past two and a half years, product management has been my primary focus in my roles at these companies – and I\u2019m still trying to figure out what that means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Product management as a discipline is fuzzy. The borders of the responsibilities of a PM aren\u2019t clear: your job, as it\u2019s explained to you, is often some combination of business, engineering, finances, marketing, QA, and design. You work across these teams to \u201cmanage a product\u201d, which usually means launching something to make the company you work for money. Product management culture at different companies is often what dictates how<\/em> you manage a product, and what combination of the above responsibilities make up your day to day work. Some product managers do a lot of project management, and sit between product and engineering. In my experience, this tends to be especially true earlier on in the role – you\u2019re responsible for features, or a specific component of your product. As you become more senior, you start working more closely with marketing and QA to ensure that there\u2019s a specific story that your feature tells, so that your customers can understand what it is that you\u2019re building. Once you really<\/em> start to get into product management as a career, you get into the business side. At that stage, the way that you manage your product is more abstract, because time is a finite resource. Ken\u2019s blog post on the topic articulates this beautifully<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve managed small teams in the past. I don\u2019t mind management, but at the time, I felt far too early in my career to effectively be able to help my team grow. They deserved more from the person who was managing them and their work. Moving back into an individual contributor role was a relief. A lot has changed in the past few years, and I\u2019m thinking more about that now. I\u2019m always, constantly, evaluating the way that I look at what I\u2019m doing, learning, and how I can be most effective in my work. Reading this post from Ken was a refreshing reminder that I\u2019m not alone in feeling a bit stuck as a mid-level product manager trying to figure out what \u201cforward\u201d looks like, and unsure about how much people management will end up in my future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n