Digital products are a team effort particularly when the product grows beyond the MVP. The leaders talk about the shared practices and workflow, and the recent proliferation of collaboration tools such as Notion, Slack, Figma, and not to forget Github clearly show that real time collaboration on work is a defining factor in the product success.
Since many of our work practices are quite similar for the dependency on the tools (and that is why such a huge adoption of these tools) whether it is for the product-market fit, marketing, data sense, or API integrations, we tend to learn from the industry for our specific use cases.
A recent tweet by KP caught my eye where they say that the tons of product management wisdom is being shared on Twitter by John Cutler, Shreyas Doshi, Marty Cagan, and others, and yet products and people struggle to understand what product means and to put this wisdom into real practice.
Every individual is unique and systems where they operate have different variables that respond differently. A doctor writing diagnosis & prescription does not mean that every doctor that sees the same patient under same condition will write the same report. We are not machines.
— Vinish Garg(@vingar) January 3, 2022
On the face of it, the product manager’s job sound to be collaborative in nature where they involve leaders and teams in different functions. Some of them could be involved more in engineering, discovery, and data while a few others might be more into strategy and pricing, revenue, or UX or even product positioning.
But every product is different because the challenges are specific and unique to the organization, its leadership style, its audience, budgets, culture, and many such factors. It means that product managers cannot simply take a playbook that works somewhere else and try to replicate it in their organizations. So, product management is about practicing product management.
I remember Shreyas tweeting about this point—PM’s work is lonely.
The Twitter wisdom excites us, it gives us confidence and I have learnt a lot from many product leaders on Twitter but when I am at work, I always notice that a lot of personal judgment and product sense that I use by my own—many decisions happen on the fly, without a context to most of the learnings that I gained from anyone. These decisions or actions are quite unique and personal to the product in a given situation, and sometimes I am not sure whether my team will understand it the way I do. This practice gives me the confidence to build on these experiences.
However, the Twitter wisdom certainly helps in building the capability and in widening our perspective from how they work and how it is working well in other organizations. In that sense, I am always thankful to my network and community on social media and in community groups.
