Product managers: creators or facilitators?

On a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, 'Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?'

A product manager is a creator, not a facilitator. I always cringe when somebody tells me, oh, my job is to say why? And I'm like, 'Well, what do you do for the rest of the week besides the 10 minutes it takes you to say why?'

The thing I didn't realize as a product manager in a large tech company is there is very little product management that you do. They're mainly just writing documents and then being the team secretary and running around getting approvals, but products live and die in the pixels. You should be designing the hierarchy, the pixels, the flows, everything. That's on you.

The job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you.

The PM is an enabler. Your job is to really make the team successful. The PM is the CEO of the product - that's one of the most incorrect things in the world.