Why Product Management is Hard

The Best of Product Managers, The Worst of Product Managers — a Tale of Two Pities

I have given a few talks where I describe product management as (despite what some commentators might have you believe) a “uniquely hard job”. This might not be a fashionable opinion after the (much misunderstood) AirBnB repurposing of the PM role, but I stand behind the assertion.

The problem with saying that any job is “hard” is that people who do different jobs think that you’re saying that their job is easy. But “jobs being hard” is not a zero-sum game and it’s quite possible for us all to have hard jobs. There’s a strong iceberg effect that affects all of us, where we look at someone’s job from afar and judge their entire worth on what we see, ignoring all the stuff that we don’t see. This is natural, but it doesn’t do anyone any favours.

In any case, there are two distinct ways that product management can be hard. We might consider these in terms of the “bad product manager” and “good product manager” from the classic Ben Horowitz post. As an aside, I do have issues with the concept of people being inherently good or bad at…