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Product Management in the top ten hundred words
Describing a fuzzily-understood job using only the top thousand most common words.
Inspired by the Up Goer Five from xkcd and written with this text editor. And no, “thousand” isn’t in the top thousand words.
This type of job is hard to understand for many people.
The biggest reason it can be hard is how different it can be from one business to another. In one business, this job may focus on doing one part of a team’s work. But in another business, a job with the same name may work on a very different part of that team’s work.
In some businesses, this job works on problems where you need to know a lot about computers, numbers and how they work. In other businesses, the job is all about talking to the people you work with and getting them to agree on your work’s direction. And in some businesses, the job is all about talking to the people who pay your business money to understand why they are sad.
This type of work is hard to learn about because it is of all these things at the same time (and more!). To do this job well, you must be able to work in each of these ways when your team needs it.
Your job is making the business work well!
Anything to add? Comment below!
(But make sure you only use the top ten hundred words!)
