Life of a Product Manager - in Cat Gifs

Because you need some fun in your life

I hope this blog is known for its thoughtful, deep and meaningful content about product management. But, and this is something I test candidates for in interviews, we are all humans. We all need a bit of levity, and not to take ourselves overly seriously.

So here is some thoughtful commentary (accompanied by cat gifs 😉) about the life of a product manager.

All image credits: stuff I found on the interwebs.

Day to Day

You hear a lot about how it’s the product manager’s job not to build anything, but to align everybody on the same outcome. You need to make sure everyone — engineers, marketing, sales, support — has the same strategic vision and context, and drives towards the same goal (“yes, yes, but we’re going that way because of the strategic direction we decided on 3 months ago.”) Most days, it feels like herding cats:

Frameworks and ways-of-working

We all love our agile frameworks, our 2x2 prioritisation and decision matrices. We know what gets stuff done. Of course, not everyone understands that a framework is just a crutch to get you started, an idea that need to be adapted to your reality. But you soldier on.

And then the CTO reads about SAFe and wants to put it in.

Or, and this comes to everybody at some point, you’re rewarded for all your good deeds with added responsibility — like helping with the ISO audit.

Also applies when your engineers tell you about some of the shortcuts they’ve taken with security measures. Speaking of which…

Devs and Designers

Designers design, developers develop, and testers test. Once all the quality gateways have caught the obvious bugs, it’s the users that invariably find the clever bugs. The ones so complex, they slipped through to production. After the inevitable hurdle of “of course it works — on my machine,” you send your developers to debug:

Then again, we never have enough UX and UI designers or QA. So sometimes the devs (or you 😜) will think it’s OK to just build something and release it to production. Then, on Monday, you open the browser and get a real good look at the colour scheme and general user experience:

The unsuspecting users, meanwhile, have the expected initial responses… all across social media and review sites.

Production Releases

Speaking of launching new products to production, it should be a careful process that coordinates everyone — sales, marketing, legal, support — with carefully considered dates and information packs, and appropriate rollback strategies.

Then again, it’s already 4pm on Friday and you need to push this through:

Scope creep

Sales will come to us with just this once could we please add something urgently to close that humongously big deal this month, but we shall reply with a firm No! and put them in their place for over-promising. Next time they’ll sell only what’s already built.

And why is that we can confidently say this? It’s because we stood up to the CEO when they came in with another Good Idea™️, or that it’s-only-10-Lines-of-Code last minute addition. We absolutely stood up and pushed back on that scope creep!

Yeah, right. Let’s be real. We all know what happens when the CEO says jump!

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The sad reality is that this post will probably get a lot more engagement than my usual content, but hey! Being a human (or a cat, I’m not judging) is important. We all need a break from the drudgery of a highly-demanding job dealing with complexity and ambiguity. Have a blast, sweet dreams, and see you next time 😺