Product Manager: Seeing Through the Cloud

The last three days has been a whirlwind experience for me.  As an engineer who has 12+ years software development experience now I am a product manager.  Granted, I wasn't the super-star; I survived a lot by using my little wits.  But now I think this new line of work requires more than a little wit would sustain, as it did for me as a developer.

 

For the last three days, I have being doing a lot of talking and listening.  I talked to my manager, his manager, my future manager, my previous manager, and the engineering architect who is working on the product with me.  Why?  Because everything is so vague in PM, contrary to being on the engineering side where everything is well defined and laid out -- and I am not just talking about a particular project.  Being an engineer, you know what your role is -- are you a QA or developer; are you at junior or senior level; will you be writing design spec or functional spec, or both; etc.  And you know what you are working on -- how the architecture diagram looks like, how the communication take place between the pieces, what needs to be spec-ed out, what needs to be investigated further, etc.  And you know what is expected of you -- either you tell your boss you need two days to write the spec on this, five days to finish that feature; or there's a timeline already in place for the project, and you just need to follow the timeline, and perhaps adjust it with your boss at times. 

 

But on the PM side, words are uttered without clarity, things are said without formality -- I often ask myself, "What does it mean?" during a conversation, therefore I talk and talk, and ask and ask, going around and around...

 

...For what?  Well, I was still an engineer three days ago; it's in my blood that I want to know what my role is, what my responsibilities are, and what the expectations are, from the very beginning.

 

None of that is defined, at least not as precisely as I would like, on the PM side.  Maybe this is a test, a subconsciously laid out test, to see how well I can navigate my way around through a cloud of information. (LOL.  I don't really think these big, super PM's have the time or energy to play such a mundane game with me, little Miss Sunshine, the most junior staff on the team, but I would like to think they did -- I helps to get my blood running.)

 

So is it a key, or at least one necessary, ability to be a good PM that you can wade through a cloud of information to find what you are looking for?  The answer is an obvious yes, as the first test shows.  One article I read in the last three days, it said, and I am paraphrasing, a PM is like a navigator, the person sitting at the front of the boat calling out the instructions (and cheers) to the rest of the team, who are doing the paddling, in a paddle boat race.  So, the ability to navigate, in my opinion, is a must for a PM. 

 

And passing this test, I haven't even started my work yet.