Being a good Product manager

If you want to be a BAD product manager, ignore issues and risks. But act as if you know and are in control in front of everything when before your bosses.

• Act as if no issues exist and just hope that they magically go away - especially when reporting to your higher-ups — since if they find out, it will make you look weak and like you can’t control your product.

• Downplay the likelihood of risks becoming issues, and downplay the impact of issues that have come up.

You want to look like you know what you’re doing, and you can’t do that if people are focusing on all of the things that are going wrong.

If you want to be a GOOD product manager, your main task is to identify and proactively manage risks and issues.

• You need to prevent risks from becoming issues, and prevent issues from having a negative impact.

• Track issues and risk for the product in the market – do a continuous SWOT analysis of your product.

• Proactively communicate the impact of potential risks for others to plan on how to react if they do become serious issues. Stakeholders may not be happy with these issues, but they at least will not be surprised and can help work through solutions.

A successful project or product is not one where there are no issues or risks. Instead, a successful project or product is one where there are many issues and risks, but the product manager or the project manager are able to identify, address, and mitigate them, and still deliver a successful product.