Patrick Collins 0:03
Learning of the different kinds of product managers, some being more creative, some being more analytical and some being more technical and knowing who you are. And therefore what if you know i’d imagine the audience is probably going to be aspiring PMs, some of them anyway. knowing who you are as a PM really will help.
Patrick Collins 0:27
And you don’t want to be a creative PM, running the platform services team, or tech or a technical PM running the onboarding project for the app, right?
David Jones 0:40
Why was it specifically what did you learn that specifically at Moveweb?
Patrick Collins 0:44
I guess I’ve learned over both of these past roles, that those different PMs can actually fail in one role and succeed and I don’t mean outright fail, like crashing and burn. I mean succeed in other ones. And so when I look for PMS, I look carefully at their background. And I look at what skills they have. And that will lean me slightly towards where I think they’re probably going to succeed as PM. Creative requires you to take some bold steps. And I think the experimentation culture, I think is damaging in some ways, because it comes across as this kind of analytical thing that that you can test your way out of anything. But it’s like, What the hell are you going to test and how are you coming up with that? Which part and you know, I think I’m on consumer app in particular, it requires a lot of bravery and a lot of courage to translate what you’re hearing from customers into a point of view, and then go test that and having that having that courage to translate data analytics and and customer interview data into into a point of view: not many PMS have that.
Patrick Collins 2:03
And it’s actually not a seniority thing I’ve noticed it’s a, it’s a risk taking trait that some PMs just will never get.
David Jones 2:12
So just to, just to play that back to you, if I’m a really good data centric type product manager, there was a Stanford saw talk I saw which was called “gut, data, gut”, which was that you’ve got to start with an intuition first, then you can go and get the data to support it or actually run and experiment for that data, then you actually have a new iteration. Are you saying that an analytic type product manager really just misses that sort of “gut” type thing and testing many different sorts of things?
Patrick Collins 2:44
CAN. Yeah, I think the concept of experimentation and being data driven, can be a cheap out for being brave and not taking not making courageous leaps on the product and maybe polishing a turd, so to speak. And so sure, I think there’s a really difficult line to walk between knowing when to polish and knowing when to try to “go for it”, like a generational leap. And it’s still kind of I’ve only been doing this product thing for 10 or 15 years now, I still haven’t quite cracked the formula for what kinds of PM is able to know when to stop polishing and know when to go for a generational leap. That’s that’s a really challenging, challenging problem for most PMs. But the idea that we can just test our way out of every problem is dangerous because it can really hold a product back.