Big company product managers have a way of becoming inward focused and abstract. By abstract I mean focusing on technology and business problems that have a very low probability of materializing and even if they do it won’t matter much. Startups on the other hand, quickly put product managers back in touch with reality – as they force you to focus on the basics: selling, building products, and building awareness (aka marketing). Here are a few signs that you are a product manager at a big company out of touch with reality and on path towards killing your career:
Your office is home: Get out of the office and talk to customers, partners, and peers at other companies. Sitting in your cube and having lunch with the same people every single day is the single worst thing you can do for your career. This doesn’t mean you need to be at every conference (the polar extreme is equally unhealthy). It does mean that the world will not come to you, you need to go it. I have seen too many incredibly talented people innovative muscles atrophy by making their office their home.
Your side project is on hold: Your current project is likely not that innovative. It could be very important – like improving the scalability and reliability of Gmail (please solve this) or shipping the next version of Outlook on schedule. What is innovative is that side project you work on a few hours a week that with a bit of nurturing could provide the seeds for something truly innovative down the road. One of my weekend side projects provided the inspiration for my current startup.
People confuse you with a project manager: My objective is not to diminish the role of a project manager — they can be invaluable for certain projects. But project managers don’t determine when to cancel products, don’t design and work with engineers to prototype a new idea, and don’t prioritize features amongst other things.
You attend organized (internal) meetings 80% of the day: You can’t recruit in internal meetings, you can’t design in meetings, you can’t talk to customer/partners in internal meetings. The folks who spend all day updating executives become overhead. These are folks who aren’t the experts in anything and they aren’t driving anything. They are well paid meeting attenders who usually say the same things over and over in every meeting. They say it so much they get really good at saying it so some people believe they must know what they are talking about. Instead figure out what you need to do to be the “CEO” of something — by CEO I mean earn the right to become the default person people ping for that thing — whether it be a feature-set, a customer initiative, or an entire project.
I will finish with a short story related to this point. A few years back I inherited a product management team. One of the product managers was constantly asking me about attending internal meeting I quickly realized he hadn’t shipped a thing because he was meeting busy — so I told him to stop attending meetings. Judging from his facial expression I got the sense that he felt like I was punishing him – for most of his career he confused meetings with work. As soon has he cut the number of meeting he attended he started shipping more product. He ended up switching groups a year later and low and behold he was back on the meeting circuit. Bad habits are hard to kill.