You’re not a black box
Jukesie wrote about his idea of unproduct people, product managers who don’t chase relentlessly after new frameworks but who grasp and execute the foundational principles. He’s right. Without understanding the rest of the product role, the senseless application of a framework isn’t ’doing product’.
But I do think the models and frameworks have their purpose.
Product management is a business strategy role, essentially. Identifying opportunities and executing on a way to achieve outcomes for the business and its market (users). Spotting possibilities and delivering results.
Invariably that involves trade-offs. Calls you had to make or ideas you disposed of along the way to delivering something that worked. And that involves communicating your ideas, your methods, the results, and all the choices you made along the way to people holding the purse strings.
There’s no way to do product management without explaining how you did it. And that is the main function of the models and frameworks: they’re scaffolding for understanding a space and its dynamics, making choices based on some variables, and then observing and noting the results.
You can learn this stuff over time and start to feel it. It can become intuitive, so you don’t need to get obsessive about the models. But they’re good training wheels for learning about strategy (how we go from idea to action to result). You have to follow the rules first, break the rules, and then you can transcend the rules.
The problem is when we rely on those frameworks or believe there is some truth about the world, about people, about systems, locked up in those frameworks. All models are wrong, but some are useful.
So while you can become an unproduct person if you like, don’t become a black box. Don’t attribute success to magic or your special touch. That’s the bit about AI everyone’s afraid of, the unknowable machine. Don’t become a black box.
Instead, get better at explaining a space and its dynamics, your methods, what won’t work and what might, and all the choices you made along the way to deliver a result.
Explainability. That’s a big part of your job – but it’s only one part.