MeshThink

“Are you a capital-P Product Manager, or a lowercase-p product manager?”

I wasn’t sure how to take the question at first — I’d never really considered my capitalization identity before.

“I worked with a product manager once,” my co-worker continued, “he made a bunch of noise about our vision and strategy, and threw a handful of projects on our roadmap. By launch, he’d swooped away to another topic that was more interesting, so he could build a new roadmap there. He was more interested in talking about ‘vision’ than finding out if what we built worked. He didn’t ever really care about the product — he just wanted the prestige of having the title ‘Product Manager’. After he moved on, I started calling him ‘capital P’ — he wanted to be a ‘Capital-P Product Manager’ on his business card, but didn’t actually want to manage the product.”

It was a passing conversation, but one that has stuck with me. Abstract, “BIG PICTURE” conversations are seductive. Product Vision! The Agile Manifesto! Discussing the big picture feels impactful. Which is going to make-or-break my product — getting the right product vision, or deciding whether to A/B test 2 or 3 UX improvements in the next sprint? Surely, the vision is the most important!

The average lifetime of a 5-year vision statement is… 1 year. The Agile Manifesto is a great set of tenets, but never survives contact with a real live development team completely intact. And that’s fine! When used properly, these big picture discussions serve to help point everyone in the same direction. But they become dangerous when refining the big picture starts to become the direction. Pay attention to the big picture items just enough so that they help guide the day-to-day decisions, but remember: what to do next is always the most important thing to get right. Never let the BIG PICTURE distract you from the present. Take care to manage the ‘lowercase-p’ product every day.