As a product manager, you probably have heard “PM is a mini-CEO” a hundred million times. While it’s repeated often, I seldom see PMs who truly self-identify as CEOs. If you are a product manager, you are probably not surprised of this disconnect between the “CEO” and the reality. When you are trying to “influence without authority” in your day-to-day work, I bet the CEO role doesn’t come to your mind naturally.
Out of all the product manager analogies I’ve heard, my favorite one is from Mat Balez, “product manager is a janitor.” You didn’t read it wrong. I believe, a good product manager is a janitor. If you think about what a product manager does, a product manager works with their cross-functional teams to deliver value to their customers. As a product manager, your task is to maximize the output of your cross-functional teams- how do you help your team work on the most important features, help your designers create the most intuitive UX, help your developers deploy the most bug-less code, and have all of them at the highest velocity.
To do this job well, it involves doing all the dirty work for your teams. As Mat Balez put, you do as much of the dirty work as possible so everyone else doesn’t have to. It’s your job to pinpoint the customer need, to answer any designer and dev questions at the first moment, to jump at any blocker you team face, to attend all the meetings, to protect your developers’ time, to manage the external communication... You do the janitor work, so your team can do their best work.
Going back to the mini-CEO analogy, Eric Schmidt beautifully articulated it in his book Trillion Dollar Coach, “Your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.” I believe that the title of product manager does not equate with power nor authority, but a product manager is a servant-leader.
