Chris Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…No, we had Ken on the podcast, we talked about it. We asked, what is the digital version of that when everyone's working remote? I think that's something that even if you're a brand new PM you come across soon enough. And then the other piece there, I really love this metaphor of scraping your knees because I find that to be so important to becoming a PM is you think you could just read these things, take some courses and you got this, and you're not going to mess up, but I find that messing up is so important in helping to learn to do the job because like you said, there's relationships and people and changing plans and leaders, and it's just like you're not going to get it right and you learn how to deal with all these things by messing it up. So, I super agree with that, and even though you said it's easier not to learn to be a PM, it's still I think important to scrape your knees a number of times for you to actually learn to do the job. Along those lines, what did you find was most helpful to you to learn the craft of product management in the first few years? What do you think back to like, "Oh, that was really helpful," other than just doing it messing up, sometimes getting it right?" So, my first product management job/mission was working on a B2B2C product, and there's a lot of unique challenges that came with that. Our customer was not the end user of our product. We sold into institutions who then white labeled our product and then resold it to the end customer. And so at the end of the day, our customers own the relationship with the end user and not us, and so- ... own the relationship with the end user and not us. And so, the challenges that that created were that there was a lot of distance between us and the voice of the end user. And we ended up building a lot of things to satisfy the buyer and the customer, but not necessarily the end user. And that's challenging because you don't necessarily know whether you're building something to get a contract signed, or you're building something that's going to delight the person using it at the end of the day, or provide magical value. And so, I think I probably shipped a lot of bad product those years, if I'm being completely honest. I don't know that I would look back at what I shipped back then or what we shipped back then, and say they were the best possible solutions or best possible product. It wasn't until I got my second product management job where it really was an inflection point, where I was like, "Oh, got it. This is what this is supposed to look and feel like." Where was that? Was that with Keeper?…

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