One of the most important parts of being a Product Manager is making sure that your stakeholders and developers understand not only what you’re trying to do, but the surrounding circumstances in which you’re trying to do it. Often, this is a matter of discussing and managing scope; at other times, it’s making sure that people understand the schedule and resources working on the improvement; and at still other times, it’s ensuring that what comes out at the end of an iteration is what everyone wanted at the beginning of the iteration. But there’s a larger set of considerations that are of key importance to aligning your teams on — because they significantly impact the overall success of what we’re trying to do. All too often we ignore these three components to our peril, and when we do there’s an even chance that they’ll come back to bite us in the ass…
First, Kill All The Product Managers!
There’s a very famous quote that’s used quite often when people are expressing their dislike of lawyers:
“First, kill all the lawyers.”
This, they posit, is something that good old Bill Shakespeare himself advocated for, after all – and what better way to stabilize our society than to dispose of the bottom-feeding trolls and sharks that feast on the noble, honest people of the world.
The trouble is, they’re entirely wrong about the quote, from beginning to end.