Product Leadership

Foreword

“So you’re the one who decides what color a box of detergent should be?”

That’s how one Silicon Valley veteran responded years ago when I told him I wanted to switch from engineering to become a product manager. It was the early days of the dot-com era, and in truth he was right. As you’ll learn in Chapter 1, for many years that was what product managers did. But as the role of product manager expanded into high tech, it adapted and evolved, meaning different things to different people. At some companies, product management was primarily an outbound marketing function. In others, it was more technical. Some companies used the term program managers for their product managers, others called them project managers, but called their project managers program managers. (Even more confusingly—everyone just called them all “PMs.”)

In the almost 20 years that have passed since that conversation, product management has matured. Today, in the digital world where we hardly agree on much, just about everyone can agree that product managers are essential contributors at the intersection of business, technology, and user experience. Thanks to successful product-first companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, people seem to finally be speaking the same language. Every year I’m contacted by hundreds of college students hoping to begin a career as a product manager. That’s awesome: when I was a college student I didn’t know what a product manager was. (Heck, I’m not sure I even ...