Product #108
Product Management in Practice, Attention Is All You Need and More.
Product Management in Practice · Matt LeMay ·2017
Product management involves stewarding a value exchange between a business and its customers without direct authority. Product managers are responsible for outcomes but rely entirely on influencing others. They bridge gaps across business goals, user needs, and technical execution by proactively filling whatever role is required rather than passively awaiting instruction.
Common pitfalls of ineffective product managers, such as the "Jargon Jockey" or the "Hero Product Manager," often stem from insecurity due to the intangible nature of their contributions. Effective product managers accept indirect recognition, understanding their value is realised through their team's success.
The CORE skill set (Communication, Organisation, Research, Execution) is vital for success:
Communication prioritises clarity over comfort, proactively surfacing ambiguity or misalignment even during uncomfortable conversations.
Organisation means setting up teams and processes that function autonomously and transparently without constant oversight, effectively making yourself obsolete.
Research requires deeply understanding user realities beyond superficial feature comparisons.
Execution ensures all actions clearly serve defined outcomes instead of demonstrating mere busywork or effort.
Curiosity is essential for product managers because it facilitates trust, builds context-awareness, and expands internal networks. Product managers should proactively learn about colleagues' work before assistance is needed, genuinely showing interest to continuously expand trust within the organisation.
Product managers benefit from adopting a growth mindset, constructively handling inevitable failures. Distinguishing personal worth from product outcomes allows transparency, humility, and openness, turning setbacks into learning opportunities.
Over-communication is safer than under-communication. Product managers must explicitly ask obvious questions to uncover hidden assumptions. Passive language (such as "looks fine") signals disengagement; direct, clear communication and proactive resolution of disagreements through techniques like "disagree and commit" lead to stronger alignment.
Product managers manage senior stakeholders effectively through clear information rather than persuasion or manipulation. Instead of fostering division ("us versus them"), they transparently explain leadership decisions, even if they personally disagree. Important decisions should be socialised privately beforehand to prevent surprises and ensure alignment. Maintaining user value at the centre of stakeholder discussions helps manage internal politics effectively.
Effective conversations with users require product managers to deliberately abandon their role as experts, adopting curiosity and humility instead. Product managers should ask users about specific past examples rather than general behaviours, letting implicit behaviours reveal deeper insights. Users should never be relied upon to prescribe solutions directly; uncovering underlying, unarticulated needs is the product manager's responsibility.
Best practices from admired companies rarely translate directly into new contexts due to differing organisational realities. Product managers must pragmatically adapt these methods incrementally and experimentally, avoiding outright copying.
Agile methodologies are often misunderstood as rigid frameworks rather than flexible approaches rooted in collaboration, frequent delivery, reflection, and continuous improvement. Ironically, strict adherence to Agile rituals often undermines its value. Effective teams pragmatically adapt Agile values to their unique contexts rather than rigidly following prescribed rules.
Documentation such as roadmaps and specifications should support team alignment instead of serving as proof of productivity or completeness. The most useful documents intentionally remain incomplete, provoking collaborative discussions. Excessively detailed documentation detaches teams from user realities and delays critical feedback; effective documentation should be brief initially, then refined collaboratively.
Product managers should avoid semantic confusion around vision, strategy, and objectives. These concepts exist simply to articulate clearly what to achieve and how. Outcomes and outputs are interconnected rather than opposites. Setting measurable goals through frameworks such as SMART, CLEAR, or OKRs gives teams freedom in execution. Effective strategy is simple, clearly defines what not to pursue, and tightly connects to daily decisions and actions.
Being data-driven requires first clearly defining the decision to be made, then selecting relevant information, not vice versa. Metrics should explicitly link to business and user outcomes while avoiding vanity metrics. Experiments should provide direct user value instead of internal victories. Accountability means deliberately aligning team actions with measurable outcomes that are continually monitored and prioritised, rather than simply hitting numerical targets.
Prioritisation explicitly involves accepting incomplete information and trade-offs. Effective prioritisation methods include starting small to gather rapid feedback, clearly segmenting and prioritising user groups, transparently documenting assumptions, and systematically managing stakeholder emergencies through structured questions to evaluate genuine urgency.
Remote work requires intentionally built trust, clear expectations, and explicit communication agreements. High-stakes discussions benefit from structured approaches ("synchronous sandwich"), which involve pre-reads, focused synchronous meetings, and prompt follow-ups. Informal interactions must be deliberately encouraged rather than left to chance.
Product leadership means shifting from individual execution toward empowering others. Effective leaders relinquish personal heroics, clearly externalise their knowledge, and consistently coach teams rather than intervening directly. Leadership effectiveness stems from enabling team autonomy, maintaining transparency, and modelling behaviours aligned with organisational goals.
Effective product management persists through both positive and negative times by proactively addressing disagreements, continuously challenging team assumptions, and avoiding complacency. Product managers should resist becoming martyrs by accepting their limits, delegating effectively, and fostering psychological safety to promote innovation instead of defensiveness.
Ultimately, ambiguity defines the central challenge and reward of product management. Formal authority is absent. Influence depends entirely on continuously earned trust, transparency, humility, and the willingness to do whatever the team and product require for success.
Quick Links
10 rules for navigating the next design paradigm · Article
Internal vs Public vs Customer Facing Roadmaps · Article
There should be no AI button · Article
Jakob’s Law · Article
Product Roadmaps aren’t ToDo lists · Article
Attention Is All You Need
Ashish Vaswani, Llion Jones, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Aidan N. Gomez, Lukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin . 2017. (View Paper → )
The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks that include an encoder and a decoder. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelisable and requiring significantly less time to train…We show that the Transformer generalises well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
This paper introduced the ‘Transformer’ a neural‑network design that dispenses with the old word‑by‑word processing in favour of “self‑attention,” letting models weigh every word in a sentence simultaneously. This shift cut training from weeks to days, set new records in machine‑translation benchmarks, and became the template for nearly every modern language model, driving the current AI boom. This paper is fast becoming one of the most referenced - it’s been cited more than 170 000 times.
Book Highlights
Default values can be immensely useful (a) where the default response can move the individual closer to action, (b) where power users can fine-tune their responses, and (c) where everyone else can breeze past the defaulted values.
Stephen Wendel · Designing for Behaviour Change
Allow your colleagues to contribute to any disciplines in which they have expertise and interest. You’ll find it creates a more engaged team that can complete tasks more efficiently.
Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden · Lean UX
The old Irish unit of the collop, for example, was defined as the amount of land needed to graze a single cow. Here is a unit that adapts to the practicalities of life, meaning lush, energy-dense pasture would be measured in smaller collops than the same area of barren hillside.
James Vincent · Beyond Measure
According to an estimate by the Standish Group, only 20% of the features and functions built are often used by users. The rest is either infrequently used (30%) or hardly ever used (50%).
Martin Christensen and Marcus Castenfors · Holistic Product Discovery
Quotes & Tweets
Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.
James Clear
Will this make me excited to wake up? Will this let me sleep in peace?
Unknown