You Might Be a Product Manager If…

• You’ve created a roadmap through 2012
• You can’t remember working less than 70 hours a week
• You’ve lost your hair (if you haven’t consider yourself warned!)
• At your annual customer summit, you stay late to setup and test products for the next day while Sales runs up a historic bar tab
• You used to be a programmer but were too extroverted
• You used to be a salesperson but were too introverted
• You use customer interview techniques with your spouse to discover the root cause of their problems so you can build a “solution” (”That’s interesting…tell me more!”<smack>)
• You wake up at night worried about getting your product’s feature-set right or hitting your ship date
• You find competitive and win-loss analysis fun (ugh, I can’t believe I just realized I find those things fun)
• You walk through the store and look at products thinking “what problem does that solve?”
• You do a SWOT analysis before making any major purchase
• The last thing you do before you go to bed and the first thing you do when you wake up is to check your email
• You’ve ever written “The System Shall…“
• You never have less than five #1 priorities
• You’ve sat behind the one-way mirror at a focus group
• One or more of the following groups is pissed at you: Sales, Development, QA, Tech Support, Marketing, or Operations. Special bonus if you get all at once.
• You enjoy writing requirements that constrain easy way out from the Programmer.

And finally…

• You write a blog about Product Management (uh oh…)

16 February 2007 | Executives, Lessons Learned, Personal, Product Management, Tactics | Comments