Product Manager, you're actually a hammer, cleaner, router.

What role does the product manager play? Mat Balez in medium on his own opinion, Mat in Google's Glass,google+,latitude,maps department as product manager, now in Airtime as the vice president of products.

I: I'm thinking about writing something about the product manager.

--s: Is it like "Ah, you should write emails like this" ...

--s: You should file files like this ...

--I: haha, that's pretty much it.

Over the past ten years, I've worked in different parts of Google as Product Manager (Products manager,pm). Now, I'm in charge of product development in a start-up company in New York. It's a conversation I had with a friend who was a former colleague of user experience Design (UX) (he likes to laugh at me). He doesn't know much about what the product manager is doing, or how they work. To my dismay, I'm not even sure if most of the product managers themselves are clearly positioned for themselves.

So, I often think about how to impart some experience to the new product manager.

The role of the product manager is somewhat vague, different in different companies, different teams in the same company, and even within the same team, the product manager's role is not the same every day. The most appropriate description of the product manager's job is a personal and several posts. In many ways, they work more like dark art than science. They are more about improving their products than creating them. They are more likely to struggle to survive at work than to travel confidently.

In short, the fledgling product manager listens: To be a big, fast-growing software team, you have to be a number of jobs and omnipotent.

You're a CEO.

One of the most common metaphors is the "product manager is the CEO of the product." To a large extent, I think this is an exaggeration, except for a handful of highly qualified product people.

The limited resources that the product manager actually controls, almost no one has to report to you that there is not much to say (or even say) about budgeting, so the product manager is mainly making improvements in the small aspects of the product, and you have to obey the big organizational structure and not be able to control it.

Even as the main head of a start-up's product, you'll find yourself simply the employee of the company's actual CEO. So as a product manager, you don't actually have any "chief executive" right.

So you have to rely on your ingenuity and influence (and more on the latter) to get your work done in an egalitarian or meritocracy system. And for the structure of the system, you're nothing special.

However, comparing a product manager to a CEO is only fully applicable when it comes to responsibility: a product manager, more like POTUS (Presidents of the United States).

To successfully develop a product, you need to combine your intuition, energy, and decision-making. If product development fails, then you have an unshirkable responsibility. However, if the product is successful in the marketplace (judged by any of the criteria you set before), you rarely get compliments: You do your job simply by letting someone else do the job well. Instead, your satisfaction comes from your own, and you know that you make good products.

You're a coach.

Most of us have been involved in school sports teams in high school or college, or in Al Pacino's speech at the movie "Challenge Sunday" (any Given Sunday), so you understand the role of the coach in the team.

Coaches are not going to be on the pitch, but they will be part of it. The coach knows how to Rimini and how to get players to cooperate with each other. But the best part of coaching may be to boost morale. The coach understands that the team is made up of people, and the relationship between people determines the efficiency of the team to a large extent. Any coach will unite his team.

A good coach can find the right way to motivate his teammates, and the great coach leads the team farther and better than anyone imagined. In times of prosperity or adversity, a coach keeps his team focused on scoring. The coach will keep an eye on the field, be optimistic, and eliminate distractions. Coaches can tell stories, inspire people's imagination, and guide the direction of victory.

The product manager is like a coach on the sideline or in the locker room, motivating his colleagues to fight. Of course, coaches (and product managers) also have different styles: some are calmly guided, others are inspired by passion. Most people are in between.

The style of the product manager has no fixed pattern, only the result is the final word: Your team around you, eager to share with you, because they believe you, and willing to work together to achieve the vision you have presented.

You're an engineer.

Of course, you are not an engineer, but let me finish. Many large software companies (such as Google) and start-ups require their product managers to have a technical background (computer/engineering degree or equivalent). The reason behind this is not to let you write code when you need it (believe me, no one would want me to write code), the purpose of these companies is to let product managers and engineers to communicate smoothly, as soon as possible to understand the core technology concepts, potential problems and future opportunities, etc. The product manager who can do this will get the respect and trust of the team members.

From this perspective, the best product Manager is a cultural engineer: you have a hacker's genes, understand the xkcd sense of humor, you have a favorite programming language, you have a low demand for fashion, you are very painful to the server crash, you can draw the best program diagram to understand how the program is implemented step-by-step. It's just, you don't have to write code and test yourself, you're responsible for all the other things that I'm going to say next.

You're a janitor.

You do all the dirty work dirty so that others don't bother. This is one of your most important jobs (or even your most important job), and only then will your team be able to operate more efficiently.

Of course, as a product manager, you will spend a lot of time with the designers to explore the exquisite interface and solve the complex interaction problems. You'll drill down into the product test and find bugs in the details. Your product will continue to affect the lives of millions of people (or even billions of) and your company.

However, some work must be done by you and cannot be shirked to others. For example, where to paste the product of the sea, because there is no assistant to do the work, such as in Friday to find a meeting for 14 people, such as the adherence to the editorial team blog, such as dealing with legal issues, such as the good preparation for the leadership to see the presentation, such as more than 300 priority To classify, for example, follow up on each person's target for the season, such as keeping the data report updated in time, such as when the PR team is away from the media, such as trying to get people to agree to some less interesting little questions, such as when the toilet is bad.

Because if you don't do these trivial tasks, it's going to be someone else on the team, which means they can't focus on their own work, and your product may be going wrong. So, put on your gum gloves and start working.

You're a hammer.

My father used to have a estwing-brand hammer, and he called it a "force tool" (Persuader). If you are a carpenter, you can use a hammer to nail a nail to any place in the plank. This is similar to the Product manager, and your first job is "influence."

Your survival is simply to convince others that they can do what you want to do with your product. Persuasion is an art based on your ability to communicate passionately with others. You need to skillfully combine data with arguments, facts and ideas, logic, and feelings.

In practice, this means that you need to write clearly, sometimes forcefully, which means that you are speaking with charisma and authority. In order to influence others, you need to win people's trust and respect. Be confident and humble at the same time as necessary.

You have to turn "no" (everyone's first reaction) into "yes" (people need convincing reasons to say it). On a larger scale, you need to be the driving force behind the events. You can't make people ambiguous, you need to get people to make a clear stand and start acting. You bring the solution, you have to keep the clutter up, avoid things getting pieces, you need to push all the negatives and eventually release the product.

A mentor once told me that "the only important thing you need to focus on is to launch a product." From this point of view, you are the hammer that you wield when you build your house.

You're a router.

Every day there will be many people will give you a variety of requirements, the specific form can be a bug submission, email, face-to-face communication, telephone, video conferencing and so on. As a PM, you are constantly faced with a lot of information and problems, many of which require your attention, and some need you to take action. In most cases, you are the best person to take action.

Therefore, your role should be the traffic police, to guide things to the right place. I do not mean to belittle this function, but to state that the role is crucial in sustaining the project. It is your duty to assign a job to the right person and finish it as soon as possible. The better your personal relationship with others, the easier it will be to distribute your work. From this point of view, you are the normal operation of the machine lubricating oil.

There's no honor in assigning information, but you'll find that keeping information in your inbox for a few days (or even hours) can lead to co-workers not working well and product progress is slow. So, being a powerful router means you need to "live online"--whenever and wherever someone needs you, you should respond in a timely manner. Do you want to do this at the time of work? Yes.

You're a super user.

You should be the most powerful user of your product. You need to be fascinated with your product (say: Eat your own dog food) so you can learn more about how to optimize your product.

In different environments, the use of products on different occasions is the best way to test why the product will go wrong, collect these bugs and give it to team members. A product manager who is constantly submitting bugs will be considered by the engineering team to be passionate, detail oriented and focused on quality.

Similarly, in real life testing products, you can see other people's view of the product, a better understanding of the user's use of products around the reaction of people.

You certainly need feedback from real users, but no user can understand the product's planning and strategy as much as you do. So you are unique in understanding the past, present and future of the product, and you are the only one responsible. No one can do the product test instead of you. If you are a product manager who is not keen on product testing, you can only say that you are a product manager who does not care about the success of the product.

You're an inventor.

As a product manager, you find yourself solving all kinds of problems every day. There is no textbook to teach you how to do it. Of course, you can use a variety of knowledge learned in school, your previous experience will also provide you with some help. But every problem has a certain uniqueness, and previous experience is often not enough to deal with new problems. So, you need to find the best solution again.

Great product managers have extraordinary creativity, they have a lot of ideas, down-to-earth solutions to complex and changeable problems. Every day, you will find that you need to "invent". Fortunately, there is no shortage of ideas around you, and in fact your team will be the source of your creativity. That's the beauty of working with a bunch of smart, creative people.

If members of the team feel that the product is having problems, a series of new ideas, new solutions, and innovative energies emerge. Most of them need to be politely rejected (you are the only person to classify these ideas as a team player). You should explore the creativity of the team and refine the creation into the product.

You're a ghost.

A product manager who knows how to take care of the whole situation should know when to disappear. What I often see is that product managers want to "create value" at every point, adding their ideas to every meeting, every discussion. These people feel that silence is considered a lack of insight. Most of the time it was well-intentioned, they just wanted to help.

But more product managers should heed the advice of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates: The first thing to do is to do no harm. If many product managers manage too much, they will suppress the people around them.

This theory is especially true when engineers work together, and engineers like to devote their time to writing code, regardless of other things. A good way to solve this problem is to wait for people and questions to come to you. If everything is normal there is no need to put everything firmly in their hands.

So, whenever possible, try not to interfere with the work of team members and help as much as possible when they need you.

You're your product.

Thousands of words into a word, you are your product. The products you develop and release represent your success as a product manager. You can't get away with this. This is your legacy. All your efforts and decisions will eventually converge into this product.

Whether your product is successful depends on whether you can play your part when any team needs you. These roles include all of the things I've listed above, and you need to constantly explore your myriad other roles in the product development process.

Enjoy the journey.