Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems. I

Bottom-up vs top-down product management

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2024-09-21 18:30:04

Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshaling the resources of your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.

I think it clearly encapsulates one of the hardest things about the job which is that it entails both “top-down” activities, like understanding the most impactful things for the company to work on, and “bottom-up” activities like marshalling the resources of the team. A few more examples:

If you’re too focused on “top-down”, to the point that you’ve retreated to the proverbial ivory tower where you throw some specs down once in a while, the company management and investors may get super excited by your work, but you will lose goodwill with your customers, sales team, and engineering team. Instead of rolling up your sleeves and working with these teams to solve even the most pedestrian problems, you are working on what’s coming in 6 months, and there is a risk you lose some travellers along the way who run into shorter-term issues. You have to keep the momentum and the “wins” rolling, and lead by example on being detailed-oriented, and that means working on “bottom-up” activities.

If you’re too focused on “bottom-up”, you may be running a prolific “feature factory”: an engineering team that ships a lot and you’re fully in sync with, but you are taking them to a local maximum. They ship great software that does not translate to lasting commercial success for the company. Perhaps you got too excited by a technical stack or a trend, but did not sufficiently validate the need or the size of the market. You may be a bit like the Thanksgiving turkey, you’re having the best time getting fed (shipping features) until you get the chop (bankruptcy/layoffs).