SUNDAY REWIND: Popular misconceptions of the product craft by Sherif Mansour

This weeks Sunday Rewind is a 2019 #mtpcon Singapore talk from Atlassian’s Sherif Mansour, in which he shares some common misconceptions about product management, looks at why we need to think differently about these issues, and considers what we should be doing instead.

Product managers make all the decisions

We need to switch our mindset about decision making. Instead of owning all the decisions, we own the velocity of decision making, says Sherif.

He says that a shared understanding of your customers, problems, and vision helps your whole team make the day-to-day decisions involved in Product. Never do customer research alone, involve the whole team in the process.

It can be hard to assess whether you have a shared understanding with your team, but a really strong signal that you’re doing well is that you haven’t spent any time in Jira recently and the team is still executing fine.

Marketing-driven development is bad

Tension between Product and Marketing is unnecessary. The best product doesn’t always win, we need Marketing to help spread the word. Product managers should educate their teams on the value of great marketing.

To progress your career, manage people

Sherif says that while it might seem right to become a manager of product managers as you progress your career, you may find you have a bigger impact by focusing on what you’re passionate about.

Tackling some of the most common misconceptions in product helps us reframe our thinking, says Sherif, and consider how we can be better at our jobs and ultimately build better products.

Watch Sherif’s talk in full: Popular misconceptions of the product craft by Sherif Mansour