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Disclaimer:
All the below items are part of humor and to provoke thoughts. The events, characters, and entities depicted in this article are fictional, and any resemblance or similarity to any actual events, entities, or person, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No Product Managers were harmed during the writing of this article.
Qualities of a Product Damager
On Requirements
- Write short 1-2 liner requirements. Let the engineering team fill in the blanks for you. Of course, everyone else needs to work hard as well.
- Don’t explain the reason why you want to build this feature. Just write what is expected input and output. You are not answerable about ‘Why’ to anyone.
- Write the requirements in an email and forward it to a broader distribution list without tagging anyone. Ask the project manager or engineering manager to move it to Jira.
On Communication
- Talk a lot, Talk jargon, Talk Abstract. Talk, Talk and Talk! Don’t deliver anything valuable.
- Delay the email responses and let people follow up multiple times.
- Your presentations should be at least 50 slides with long content and infographics to showcase thought leadership.
On Meetings
- Set up a lot of meetings. Invite everyone even if not required. Talk for the maximum amount of time. Leave little room for others to talk. If they have something more to discuss, set up another continuation meeting.
- Deny a few meetings to show you have too many conflicts.
- Try to attend every meeting you are invited to. Always join 5-10 mins late and show how busy you were with the previous meeting.
On Team Work
- Call out 4-5 people’s names randomly and call it a team.
- Throw bigger challenges at the team without working through the solutions along with them. Your company has recruited people who are here to solve your problems.
- Don’t own the motivation aspect of your team. Of course, everyone is paid for their work; what else is required.
On Competition
- Don’t waste time looking at what the competition is doing.
- Blindly copy some cool features from the competition without understanding what problem they are solving and why.
- Call it ‘catching up with the competition.
On Analytics
- Don’t waste your time looking at dashboards, active customers, and trends daily
- Build your opinions and enforce them over others. Ignore data.
- Always joke that 83% of statistics are always wrong! Why look at data.
On User Interaction
- Users don’t know what they want. Build products on behalf of your users.
- Meet them once a year to showcase newly launched products.
- Don’t share your contact info with them. You may be flooded with too many emails and waste time responding to them.
On Prioritization
- Listen to the execs what they want next.
- Use your instinct and opinions to prioritize a list of items that execs picked. Data is irrelevant!
On Roadmap
- Build a laundry list of things without any prioritization. Ask the team’s opinions about what they want first or what is possible easily
- Stick the same laundry list if someone asks for a Roadmap.
- Rarely update it.
On Innovation
- Build a team of a few smart people and call it the Innovation team. Then leave everything to them to figure out the problems and solutions. Check once a year with them on what’s happening.
- Hardly pick any items from the Innovation team and bring them to the core product.
On Sales, Marketing, Support, UX teams
- Let them do their work on their own and have no links to what you are doing as a product person
- Rarely meet them
Final thoughts
There are so many ways to become a Product Damager! So much hard work is required to be a bad product manager. Anyway, if you going to do hard work, do the right things instead; you may find incredible results. Now you know what to do and what NOT to 🙂
Mangesh is Product Leader
Full Bio here – https://mangesh.bhamre.in
