To some it's a parking lot, to me it's a shopping cart race track

One of the great things about always working and continuously striving for that next project, metric, or deliverable, you don’t have time to stop and think about how you ended up doing what you are doing. With my current family situation, I have had too much time to think.  I am coming up on 20 years of at least being full or part time product management.  I have managed my own products for good and bad, I have managed small groups of products again for good and bad, I have run large organzations product departments, mostly for good. and I have been the general manager of product teams in large organization, always for good.  Nearly 20 years ago I fell in love with the idea of product management.  I was a confused liberal arts kid out of college and I was thinking about being an engineer, a salesperson, or a copywriter.  Then applying for a random job at WordPerfect, I was asked to prepare a business plan and explain what I would do with a product line.  They loved my plan but laughed at me when they found out I had no experience. I offered to work for free, they refused, but the dye was set.  ”product manager.” was the road for me.  During those 20 years I have often wondered if I would be better suited in other roles. I love business development but am not a fine strokes kind of guy, sales is great for a week or two but I like my days to be different, I love the magic of marketing, at points I am technical enough to drop in on architecture discussions but I always end up in some way as the product guy.  I have plenty of internal and second hand experience to tell me the mairrage of my position to my person is a good match, but with Google and FB leading a charge to push product to its engineering extreem, I had some doubts. Amazon, Apple and countless others stand as pillars of good business centric product management but one can’t help but wonder.  So it was great to find this on slideshare. I know my weaknesses more than anyone else but I also know my strenghts.  On slide 9 there is a list of personality features benefits of a great product person, I nodded my head, and told myself I made a good choice. In what ever role I do in the future, I will always be the “product” blank.

Posted via email from Tom Andrus’s posterous