Shaun Clowes: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love this point and it's especially painful that when someone works with a PM that's not great. There's just this meme of why do I need PMs? PMs are useless, PMs suck, and it just creates that no one's ever like, "Engineers are useless or designers are useless." But there's so many people are like, "I don't need product managers on our team. Never hire a PM," and it just sets the whole profession back. When I first started out in PM somebody, it's obviously a chestnut, but he pointed out that realistically when you're a product manager, your job is to say no to 90% of things that get brought your way. And so that kind of makes you the bad person pretty much from the start. And so you're saying no to 90%, so you can say yes to 10% and that kind of puts you behind the eight-ball right at the very beginning, and so you have to very quickly get runs on the board. You have to prove to have the right insights, to have the right data, to make the right decisions or you don't get another go, you don't get another swing at it. So it makes sense that product managers are the easiest to single out and criticize, but that is also what makes it the funnest thing. If you think about why do we do this? Somebody once asked me, "Would you retire? Why do people do what they do? " Because certainly at some point it isn't just about the money and at the end of the day product management is so damn fun because it's about trying to figure out an edge. It's like trying to look at the world, find the portion of the chessboard that isn't occupied, but that is valuable and find a way to get into it, invade it and destroy it. It's decisions under uncertainty and that makes it unbelievably fun. Really, really painful and very frustrating and very hard to convince people, but very, very fun. So in equal measures basically. What's the answer, Shaun? How do we solve this problem? I know you said it's your life's work. What do you find actually helps most in helping PMs level up and become say 10 X PMs?…

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