Product Thesis

When I was in business school I was misguidedly recruiting for investment banking and management consulting jobs. I would ask the MDs and partners at recruiting events why they stayed in their jobs for so many decades. The answer was (almost [1]) always the same: “I love the people I work with”. No offense to my many friends in banking and consulting, but I guess you gotta love the people you work with to put up with the challenging lifestyle, business travel, and work-life balance of working in a professional services role!

Over nearly two decades in industry, my best professional experiences track along this same theme. The most memorable roles that I have held featured two things: The opportunity to regularly get into a flow state to build something and amazing people with whom to build side-by-side. I’ve been fortunate in that there are several instances that I look back at and think, “Wow that was such a fun gig, I wish I could go back in time and relive those years!”.

The interesting thing is that what I was building did not really factor into my joy at work. While the past decade of my career has been on very cutting edge “sexy” technologies, the fond memories stem from the people I worked with and the blast we had together, not the specifics of what we built.

This leads to two dials to help guide one’s career. First, what percentage of your time at work is spent building and creating? This can mean writing code, designing circuits, creating UI, crafting a strategy, writing a PRD, or even building a team. Second, do you enjoy the people you work with? Would you hang out with them as friends if you were not working on the same team?

Of course, you cannot dial both of these to 100%. Every job has aspects which are unpleasant and a grind and every organization has difficult people with whom you have to figure out a working constructive relationship. Instead, think about what is under your control to increase either or both of these dials by 20%? 30%?

Lastly, think about your current gig and the people who make it special. Let those people know that they make it special. And hopefully, you are in one of those roles that you will look back at 10 years from now and think, “Those were the good old days!” [2].

[1] One person did say that his family had become accustomed to the lifestyle that his professional services job afforded and because of that he can’t quit even though he wanted to!

[2] Michael Abrash, Meta Reality Labs Research Chief Scientist

One of the challenges that emerge in companies doing long-term 0-1 projects (true new to the world stuff, not “new to that company”) is that it is very hard to get accurate signal on product/market fit. The only true test of PMF is contact with the market followed by feedback and iteration. However, this is often not possible in deep tech projects that take many years to complete and launch.

In organizations doing multi-year projects without market contact, it becomes very difficult to determine whether the product is headed in the right direction. Often times your only guides are intuition, deductive reasoning, and prototypes with dogfooding and UXR studies to get directional signal.

In organizations beyond early stage startups, the product manager / product leader is not the same person as the CEO. When the product direction is being determined by intuition and opinions, the CEO’s opinion wins out. This means that the PM’s job involves a lot of “influencing” (convincing) the CEO of the “right” course of action.

This in turn sometimes becomes a measure of impact in of itself. In some organizations, “landing strategy” is one of the requirements of the PM job, and at senior levels, convincing the CEO (and the rest of the organization) of a particular strategy is an activity and outcome for which the PM is rightfully rewarded.

However, this becomes a problem when the organization culture starts to conflate such influence for actual product success. There are certainly CEOs who have an incredibly strong product sense and intuition about what will succeed in the market. At the same time, a single individual, no matter how accomplished and successful, is not the same as an actual market of paying customers.

PMs should be recognized and rewarded for convincing leaders and the overall organization of their vision, strategy, and roadmap. At the same time, such an outcome is not evidence of product success. It is just one step along the path to building the product and getting contact with the market. Remember, the market is the only true discriminator of product success.