The dreaded Product Manager BBQ question
That existential angst when PMs are asked what they do for a living
For a while on the podcast I used to ask the “BBQ question” of my guests… the basic format being along the lines of:
You’re at a BBQ & are chatting to your sister’s new boyfriend, getting on famously. He’s an accountant or something. He asks you what you do for a living & you say “I’m a product manager!” & he says “What’s a product manager?”
I stopped asking this a while back (and can’t even remember why I stopped) but I did ask it on Twitter recently and the replies made me think a little bit about the types of response you get.
The fundamentalist
This is the type of person who wants the world to be just like Inspired. When asked by a layperson what a product manager does, they’ll respond along the lines of “it’s my job to discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible”. This is accurate (in “proper” product companies at least, rather than the dreaded feature factories), but it isn’t going to resonate with anyone who hasn’t read the book or who doesn’t know what product management is already.
