9 concepts you will not find in any product management book

What PM theory is missing

There is so much product management theory misses.

Here are 9 concepts you won’t see mentioned in any product book:

[1] 𝐀𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐞𝐬: storytelling is a secret superpower of product builders. Great stories connect insight with understanding. There is no better bridge than analogies. It’s the mental version of “draw me a picture”. And a picture is worth a thousand words.

[2] 𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐬: mental models help you cut through the noise and make thoughtful decisions. Principles are the foundations of mental models. The right principles help you choose which mental models to apply, and optimise for great decisions.

[3] 𝐓𝐚𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠: your experience dictates your default path. But often, your team won’t be experienced. The best way to bring your experience is to guide them through. Great taletellers add the right amount of detail, passion and reflection in their stories, to make sure the audience gets the point.

[4] 𝐍𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐡𝐢: Japanese define it as “informal process of quietly laying the foundation for some proposed change or project”. A PM relies only in the power of influence, not authority.

[5] 𝐄𝐝𝐠𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠: the Devil might be in the defaults, but Murphy’s law happens in the edge cases. Most products fail, not because you missed the happy path, but when an edge case exists, your users will trip on it. Edge casing is the art of pushing the boundaries of “what are we missing?”.

[6] 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 / 𝐏𝐫𝐞-𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐦: Shane Parrish says inversion offers you the power to avoid stupidity. That’s pretty appealing in a world where stupid decisions are costly. In the PM life, inversions are often called pre-mortem, where you discuss all the things that could derail an implementation.

[7] 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐭: if you know tech debt, then understanding product debt is easy. Every time you don’t run research you accumulate product debt. Every time you don’t test a prototype, you accumulate product debt. Every time you skip documenting stuff, you accumulate product debt.

[8] 𝐏𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐦: the act of saying “screw it”. Not the “screw it, I don’t care”, but the “screw it, let’s figure it out as we go”. Pragmatism makes you think in an effective way, not an efficient way. It protects from adding a framework, a process or a tool that is just going to add friction, not harmony.

[9] 𝐌𝐚𝐲𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠: PM’s have no authority, but often you see yourself having to rally your team. When you make that impactful speech. When you organise that offsite. When you bring those doughnuts to make the team love mondays. This is what I call “mayoring” or “acting as the mayor of your small town”.

Ask any seasoned PM, and I bet they’ll share a story when one (or more) of 👆changed the course of their products.