A Product Manager is supposed to be the great connector—the person who brings engineering, design, and business together. PMs are expected to be curious, collaborative, and customer-obsessed. They align stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and create clarity from chaos. They're not the boss, but they lead. Not the expert, but the glue.
As a teenager, I was all ideas and no follow-through. Every week brought a new concept, a new scheme, a new startup in my head. I wore my imagination like a badge. But over time, I had to confront something uncomfortable: ideas weren't rare. They were a ten a penny, a kind of noise that kept me from actually doing the hard work.
The push to remove feelings from product management is misguided. We've somehow convinced ourselves that good product decisions must be purely rational, backed by data, stripped of intuition. This is mad.
Most PM hiring is broken. Companies copy generic interview processes, ask "tell me about a time when..." questions, and end up with people who can talk about product but can't actually do it.
The problem starts with not knowing what you actually need.
I recently found the first ever design document I created, from back in 2000.
A Product Manager is supposed to be the great connector—the person who brings engineering, design, and business together. PMs are expected to be curious, collaborative, and customer-obsessed. They align stakeholders, navigate ambiguity, and create clarity from chaos. They're not the boss, but they lead. Not the expert, but the glue.
Have you ever tried to create a language from scratch? I began creating one for fun a while ago, and I've been trying to teach it to ChatGPT,. Langaf is a fictional language that is similar to English and uses a base twelve counting system.
Application Programming Interfaces, or APIsAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs define the methods and data formats that applications can use to request and exchange information., are an essential component of modern software development. APIsAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs define the methods and data formats that applications can use to request and exchange information. allow different software systems to interact with each other, facilitating the exchange of data and functionality between them. However, while APIsAPI A set of rules and protocols that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. APIs define the methods and data formats that applications can use to request and exchange information. have become ubiquitous in modern software development, their documentation often leaves much to be desired.
Every PM should have an angle - a specific area of depth that makes them genuinely useful. I think of these as the 5Ds:
You’re probably used to the ever-present idea of an MVP:
Create a product with the minimum set of features that are enough to satisfy early adopters and provide a basis for feedback and future development.