Lenny Distilled

Product managers: creators or facilitators?

Craft → Product Sense

On a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, 'Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?'

Marty CaganThe disease of process people
Supporting

A product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, 'Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?'

Marty CaganProduct management theater | Marty Cagan (Silicon Valley Product Group)
Supporting

The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing documents and then being the team secretary and running around getting approvals, but products live and die in the pixels. You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you.

Nikita BierDriving alignment within teams, work-life balance, and the changing PM landscape
Nuanced

The job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you.

Ben Horowitz$46B of hard truths: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear | Ben Horowitz (a16z)
With caveats

The PM is an enabler. Your job is to really make the team successful. The PM is the CEO of the product - that's one of the most incorrect things in the world.

Manik GuptaBecoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, founder mode, more