[Public] Tech for PMs
- My brief: “Everything around Tech for PMs - what and how much they should know being in a PM role and what is required to succeed in such a role”
- What is the question here, really?
- Should a PM know how to code?
- No
- But that is only a part of the the actual question being asked
- I believe the real question here is alluded to in the brief, but unarticulated
- like so much in our profession, this imo is a problem of semantics
- What is “Tech”?
- Technology
- “the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry”
- “from Greek τέχνη, techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -λογία, -logia[2]) is the sum of any techniques, skills, methods, and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation.”
- Archimides: δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω
- Give me the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.
- Said to be his assertion in demonstrating the principle of the lever
- That lever has turned out to be technology
- What has made the lever of technology truly scale is software
- Building and productionizing software is now a critical path challenge, and the single most significant contributor to scaling for any such “technology lever,” also known as a “product” in our industry
- Incredibly tough because we are not smart enough to deal with the complexity - and unlike finance or markets, can’t hand wave through
- Requires persistence over all else
- What is a “PM”
- The people responsible for discovering, productionizing and monetizing technology levers are called product managers
- PMs use technology to materially, measurably shift reality
- General management role focussed on understanding, aligning and co-ordinating execution across sales, marketing, design, engineering etc. to ensure that product ships, and that shipped product impacts key metrics
- Broadly speaking at the intersection of 3 complex systems
- Market
- Organization
- Software
- PMs need to understand and align the operations of teams working in each of these three areas to deliver software products to market
- Product execution == Operations
- Software specifically is a key risk, with failure rates of software projects anecdotally being as high as 95%
- Improving this figure is primarily an operations problem and secondarily an alignment problem
- PM core skills
- Courage
- Project Management
- Project Management
- Project Management
- x-fn Delivery dynamics - eng, desgin, marketing, exec etc.
- Stakeholder alignment
- Becoming a PM
- Project management + 1 domain expertise = head start
- Understand the canvas - technology + people
- There’s on such thing as a junior PM or APM, only experienced PMs and people seeking that experience
- Production experience is the only experience: There is no sandbox
- A concluding note on “fear”
- Many PMs and aspiring PMs I meet are afraid of what they don’t know
- The biggest bucket is under this label called “tech”
- Don’t use “tech” as a way to re-label “fear”
- Study what makes you anxious, don’t avoid it
- Worst thing to do