If you want to be a bad product manager, hoard information. This is a competitive field, and you can’t let others know your secrets. Don’t share any lessons learned, as they can only be used by others to create products that will compete with yours. Refuse to talk shop with other product managers — it’s a waste of time, after all, since it takes your focus off your product. Telling others how you do your job or what your experience is with product management is just a bad idea.
If you want to be a good product manager, share your knowledge. Realize that you have lessons to share but even more to learn. Know that you improve your own skills and expertise when you teach others. The vast majority of other product managers are not competing with you, so everyone benefits when knowledge is shared. Communicating your perspective helps you explicitly formulate your own beliefs, affirming good practices and making you question bad ones. It overall raises the level of discourse about product management and ultimately helps product managers and product development professionals do their jobs better and create better products, in turn helping any consumers of those products.
So that’s why I’m starting this blog — to share what I’ve learned, to help me, to help you, and to maybe in some small way help everyone. Okay, that’s a lofty goal, so let’s start with the first few and work our way up from there.
How To Be A Good Product Manager features tips on product management and product development, written by Jeff Lash, a product manager based in St. Louis, MO who specializes in product management for online and web-based products.
2 responses so far ↓
Anish // Jan 23, 2009 at 3:36 pm
jeff
A bit sceptical about sharing things to every one.Does a small disceation help as it is the better part of valour
David Locke // Jan 23, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Anish,
To get your PMI certification, you have to learn the relevant body of knowledge. That body of knowledge has come into being because people shared what they knew.
Sharing does lead to commoditization eventually, but it takes a long time for something someone said to become something everyone said.
When you participate here, you only find content that others shared or communicated. If we didn’t share our thoughts in comments, then Jeff like other bloggers wouldn’t know he had an audience, and he would stop blogging, or sharing, or communicating what he knows, and we wouldn’t have this resource.
Sharing what we know creates a resource. Contributing is one way of saying this has been valuable to me.
Leave a Comment