As Marty Cagan tells us, product is hard. As product managers, we have to wrap our heads around all the moving parts of our product, our team, our customers, our organisation and our industry; we have to make difficult decisions, juggle competing needs, be the voice of our users, champion our teams and represent our stakeholders – and we have to do it all while being approachable, available and taking the time to listen to everyone we work with and for.
The product writers and thinkers whose work I have read usually acknowledge this fact. What they don’t always mention is that unless we’re founders as well as product managers, we don’t necessarily get to decide how we do all of these things, and we often have to make compromises and adjustments from the way we’d like to work in order to fit in with existing processes and practices, the limitations of the technology we’re using, or simply the way the highest-paid person in the room wants something done.
For this reason I have learned to take the pragmatic approach, which can be summarised as: pick your battles. If we want to do our jobs well, there are compromises we can make and there are compromises we can’t and shouldn’t. In this series of posts I’ll talk about the challenges of doing product in the real world, and share some of my tools for meeting them.
The Product Pathway 