If you want to be a bad product manager, define the scope of your product as how you see it. After all, you’re a product manager, right? You’re not a supplier manager, or a vendor manager, or a promotion manager. You can’t be held responsible if the free gift you offer with your product breaks within the first week.
It’s not your fault if your program won’t install correctly on computers with certain virus software. How are you supposed to know when a partner website changes their design without notifying you so that all your links to them break. In cases like this the best only thing you can do is just let customers know it’s not your fault and tell them to whom they should be complaining.
If you want to be a good product manager, define the scope of your product as how the market sees it. You know where the internal boundaries are; you know who is responsible for what within the company and probably who dropped the ball on something outside of the “official” scope of your product. You need to forget all of that. What really matters is the scope of your product from the point of view of the customer.
Everything that the customer experiences in relationship to your product is ultimately your responsibility. Delays fulfilling a rebate may technically be because of mistakes made by the company handling the payment processing, but it reflects badly on your product. Broken links from your website to another may be because of changes the other site made, but customers perceive it as a problem to your site.
It’s very easy to draw the line and say that certain things are outside your control. That’s a short-sighted approach, though. Ultimately, those within the organization and outside it will look to you when these types of issues arise, and for the overall good of your product (and your career) you need to step up and take responsibility.
Thank you. I discovered your blog tonight, and I am sure to become a faithful reader.
Hi Jeff,
very true. it’s mostly crucial for smaller companies, as working around other people’s product issues with limited resources may delay your product’s development.
No doubt, more one takes responsibilities, bigger possibility of one is promoted is, so when you think you are the source of all issues, that means you do not draw a line and say something outside of your control, or means everything is inisde of your control, from in-person point of view to see, something is outside of his/her control, but from others’ point of view to see, he/she must be responsible for everything.
It is a problem about guiding or satisfying ? the former is guiding customers(something is outside of my control, the later is satisfying them(everything is inside of my control), regardless of the answer, taking everything related with product including product self as in-person responsibility means product’s scope defined by customers.
Hello.
Just started following your blog today!
Yeah ten years later! But better late than ever . I am a product manager from Egypt and I have a question regarding this post. How do you own the responsibility internal without causing internal disputes or conflicts between departments when you try to fix someone else’s issue or amend in his process?