Product Management is Leadership and Drive

It's not 100% L&D, but increasingly so.

Product Sense is still important, and that comes from talking with customers.

But if you work for a weak company and a weak Product Leader (I'll get to this point), then you need to apply leaderhip and drive to get in front of customers.

Empathy is essential to product sense; but it's also the foundation to leadership.

So...if PM's, even those who are IC's, should have instinctive leadership and drive, the biggest pain is working for a Head of Product, as I did, who lacks Leadership and Drive.

The non-stop chomping at the bit to encourage him to step up and make a decision when engineers and everyone are pulling us into different directions.

The pain of having suggestions and nudges on roadmaps, initiatives, internal alignment -- just land in a black hole.

I think the problem in my case is my Head of Product really was a DevOps and Engineer at heart; he liked getting into the weeds, always wanted precision, accuracy and more data.

The converse: he disliked discussing go to market, growth, vision, ambitious next steps.

He spent alot of time in the past what the product should have done in the last two years...even though he was head of product for the past three!.

I am decompressing from my job being whacked when he, under the pressure of not performing, was able to just leave in glory and our org looked like a shit show that didn't do anything ambitious or challenging.

Very painful lessons.

The most critical is: especially in Product Management, leadership and drive are critical...the most critical is leading an incompetent manager