Ben Horowitz, the well-known investor who had also built up a billion-dollar business before, shared his thoughts about product management in his book The hard thing about hard things . As Ben wrote, a good product manager is the CEO of the product. Product managers must know the market, the product, the product line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

Taking responsibility instead of blaming others

Good product managers measure themselves in terms of the success of the product. They know the market and the user needs. They lead their team to design and build a product that will perform well under those circumstances. And they take full responsibility.

As you can imagine, it takes a lot of time, to get to know your market well enough. Fortunately in the past 5 years it became much easier to build prototypes and to do research. At UX studio we help product managers with regular insights and feedback from their target audience through UX research. We can’t do your job, but we can give you valuable UX support, so it will be easier to make the right product decisions and take responsibility for them.

“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.”

Managing the team instead of working in the team

Good product managers are not part of the product team. They manage the product team. Instead of micromanaging the development or solving minor communication issues they set clear goals on what to build. “Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the “what.” Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out “how”. Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally.”

Good product managers don’t care too much about the competitor’s feature set. They focus on revenue and customers instead, and they define a good product that has a chance on the market.

“Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the market place during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during outbound. Bad product managers 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.”

While bad product managers are spending their days with putting out fires, good product managers anticipate the serious product flaws, devise a plan, and build a real, long-term solution. A product manager has to be wise enough to stay calm, ignore the minor issues and focus on the important problems and goals.

We recently wrote an ebook: “Product Managers’ guide to UX design”. Click here to download!

Communication with internal teams and the press

“Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally. They take written positions on important issues (competitive silver bullets, tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, markets to attack or yield).”

Product managers has to communicate with other teams too. “Bad product managers complain that they spend all day answering questions for the sales force.” While wise product managers help themselves with creating FAQs, presentations, white papers.

“Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and being really technically accurate with the press. Good product managers ask the press questions. Bad product managers answer any press question. Good product managers assume press and analyst people are really smart. Bad product managers assume that press and analysts are dumb because they don’t understand the difference between push and simulated push.”

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