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My Biggest Mistakes When I First Became a Product Manager
I first worked as a Product Owner when I was 23 years old and had less than a year of full time experience. As with most Product Managers at the time, I got my role by overstating my knowledge and experience, ultimately leading me down a path of real time learning and wisdom building. Upon reflection, here are the biggest mistakes that I made in my first Product Management role:
- Pretending I Understood What The Development Team Was Saying
In my first role as a Product Manager, I embraced a “fake it til you make it mentality” towards getting things done that had actually worked pretty well for me through internships and college. In my first years’ grooming sessions, I would discuss a user story as confidently as I could manage and open the room up for questions as cooly as possible, while praying to God that there were no questions. There always were. Developers would ask lightly technical questions (“Where is the information stored?” “What is the mechanism for storing?” “Do we own the data?”) and I would flounder. I would NEVER ask clarifying questions and would as often as possible attempt a “let’s take that offline” to get the heat off of me and my ignorance, doing my best to point developers towards someone I felt could better provide clarity. The fear was that the team would learn that I was an idiot that didn’t know…
