Good Product Manager vs Bad Product Manager

Posted on

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading “The Hard Thing about Hard Things”, a great book by Ben Horowitz, would definitely recommend for anyone working in fast growing companies or teams that are looking for advice across all facets of a business.

As I was reading through the book, I came across an excerpt written by Ben titled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” where he walks through some of the good and bad qualities of product managers across a variety of industries.

In essence, he states that good product managers know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operates from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. They are the CEO and owner of that product and they must take full responsibility for the success or failure of the product. They are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no excuses).

Bad product managers have lots of excuses. Not enough funding, the engineering manager is an idiot, Microsoft has 10 times as many engineers working on it, I’m overworked, I don’t get enough direction. They voice their opinion verbally and lament that the “powers that be” won’t let it happen. Once bad product managers fail, they point out that they predicted they would fail. They define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem). They get very confused about the differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity. Good product managers decompose problems. Bad product managers combine all problems into one.

You can read the entire excerpt here: https://a16z.com/2012/06/15/good-product-managerbad-product-manager/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *