Every quarter (sometimes every month) I try to review “key lessons on my product career”. I take a few and add a few. It’s a long list by now, but I cherry picked 10 that have been pretty consistent throughout the years 👇

1) Common sense is the most utilized and important skill on the PMs day-to-day.

2) Product management is chaos and will (almost) always be chaos. No chaos = low ambition.

3) Product is more about what you decide not to build than what put in the roadmap.

4) There is always another way. No matter who says otherwise (engineers, CEOs or customers used to the old way).

5) You can’t build a product within four walls, you got to go to the customer. I might rephrase this to “from within zoom calls”

6) There is no 9-to-5 in product. Your user’s problems don’t clock out.

7) Everything takes longer than you think. Generally 3x longer (with 3x the cost, and 1/3 of the impact)

8) Understanding the right requirements is about reading between the lines.

9) Silver Bullets don’t exist. No matter what customers say or data shows. A silver bullet is an outlier.

10) Being a feature factory is easy, comfortable and makes you look great as a PM. Rarely is the right way.

Looking forward for a review next quarter and seeing if I changed my mind on any of these.