How To Be A Good Product Manager

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If you want to be a bad product manager, hope that cool unexpected aspects of your product or service will make up for deficiencies in other areas. Sure, your product has some flaws, but it’s easier to add some neat features than fix the parts that are broken. Enough attention-grabbing items will draw attention away from the problem areas, and the positive feedback you get from the nice-to-haves will make people forget what’s missing.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, blame others for your product’s problems. The reason it’s not selling is because you have bad salespeople. The reason customers are complaining about bugs is because QA didn’t do a good job testing it. The reason it’s getting bad reviews is because marketing didn’t promote the product correctly. The reason it doesn’t include the key features customers want is because the engineers got behind and couldn’t fit them in to the schedule. Whatever the reason for the product not being successful, it’s not your fault, so make sure everyone else knows that.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, have someone else do the dirty work for you. You’re important (your title includes “manager,” after all) and you’ve got important things to do, like go to meetings and create presentations. You can’t be bothered with doing the “little things” like following up on customer questions, maintaining communication with partners, or interfacing with all the different functions within your company.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, ignore the potential for future competition, especially from bigger and non-traditional competitors. You need to focus on who your competition is now, and what you need to do to get ahead of them. Worrying about who might get in to your market is worthless — and if a big competitor comes in and wants your turf, there’s not a whole lot you can do anyway. Focus on the present and do what it takes to win, and wait to see what  happens next.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that if you build a great product, getting people to buy it will not be a problem. Just figure out what needs there are in the market, design a product that meets those needs, and the money will just roll in.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, build the “best” product and assume that the customers will come. That’s all that matters to customers, right? Sure, it might seem like a bit of a hassle at first to switch over, but once people will realize how great your product is, they won’t mind at all.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, assume your product is the center of your customers’ world. After all, you’ve created the most amazing product ever, so who wouldn’t want to use it all day? Sure, you’re spending 40+ hours a week thinking about your product, though you’re sure that customers and users are just as enthralled by it.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, release all of your features at once. If you have some cool functionality, why would you wait to show it to the world? You need to get as much out as you can right away — if users don’t see everything that you have to offer the first time they use the product, there’s a chance you might lose them. Sure, there may be some features that they don’t care about, but customers will gladly sift through extra functionality to find the few pieces which might be really worthwhile.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, just focus on prioritizing features. That’s what product managers do, after all — just collect features from customers and decide which are the most important ones to add to the product. Plus, now with all these great tools that let you collect features directly online and have customers vote on them, it’s even easier since your customers are doing all of your work for you!

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If you want to be a bad product manager, copy everything that Apple does. Everyone knows that Apple has some of the best products in the world, so you’d be a fool not to copy what they do. If you want to create a product as successful as the iPhone or the iPod, then just follow their lead.

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