Recently I finished reading the very popular “Everyone is a Product Manager”.
The version I read was 2.0; this is roughly a reading reflection.
This book is actually an entry-level popular science read.
The author tries to use concise language, vivid examples, and necessary terminology to interpret the daily life of a Product Manager (PM).
Because the book’s positioning is not a textbook,
expecting to learn algorithms from this book the way you would from “Introduction to Algorithms”,
or to learn the way of code from this book the way you would from “Code Complete” would be expecting too much.
But many places in this book have a special, fun perspective.
:) Or you could say sometimes looking at problems from a more PM angle is indeed more fun.
For example, the book mentions a line:
For things done once, seek a feasible solution; for things done repeatedly, seek the optimal solution.
This line is very scientific.
Because it’s the same when writing programs.
For some low-frequency requirements,
programmers will write a script to do it.
But if this requirement keeps coming up,
the programmer will re-examine the problem,
think it through thoroughly,
and then optimize/rebuild the previous script.
There’s another line in the book (slightly condensed)
Passion for a domain is shown by what you’ve done. “What you’ve done” means “output” not “input”. For example, what books you’ve read, what websites you browse are all inputs. But writing some articles that say something substantive, or making some demos, even very small ones, count as output.
Although this paragraph is about how to interview PMs,
actually any matter follows this principle.
For example,
recently I haven’t dared to say “I really like 2D culture.”
Because I haven’t uploaded a video for a long time,
participated in anime-related discussions,
or even sent bullet comments (shame).
So even though I do watch some anime and manga in my spare time,
these are merely inputs.
I haven’t produced any output (smug face).
A Section I Really Like
There’s a small chapter in the book called “How to Take Someone Down by Asking Questions”.
The gist is when someone is presenting PPT,
you can ask these questions to take them down:
- Why do this thing? Will people die if we don’t?
- Is this the user’s goal or our goal? Is it the boss’s goal? What if the boss changes?
- Is this user representative? How many people do they represent? What priority is this type of user to us?
- What’s the data source? When was it obtained? How was it sampled?
- Why haven’t we seen the big picture of this product line? What will this product look like in 5 years? What’s your path to realizing that whole picture?
- The future is indeed beautiful, but how to achieve it? If we only do one thing now, what’s the most important? How do you plan to do it?
- … (and many more)
Just from a rough glance through the questions,
I can already imagine the awkward silence in the meeting room…
Actually this series of “Take Someone Down” questions
has the same meaning as “How to Write Unmaintainable Code”:
through reverse thinking (what if I were a troublemaker) to improve oneself.
Curiosity and Action
The book repeatedly mentions a pair of words: 【novice】 and 【expert】.
And then says
“A good PM not only has a novice mindset, loves to think, refuses ’existence implies reasonableness’.
They also have expert ability, picking things up fast, being good at whatever they do.”Bah… this isn’t exclusive to PMs… the author is shameless :)
Actually in my eyes these are just two words:
curiosity and action.
Curiosity drives us, when we see something,
to want to play with it and experience it,
then try to figure out how it works.
It also inspires us to see through phenomena to the essence.
For example, like the principle in the XYZ problem:
through the Z problem, past the Y problem, see the original X problem.
Action helps us satisfy our curiosity.
Taufiq in his own article asked himself:
“(Why should I act on my thoughts?)
Is it that only my mind has thoughts?”
And he answered himself:
“Others have thoughts too.
But few can let their thoughts come into the world.”
Reusing the phrasing above,
curiosity increases input,
action turns input into useful output.
In summary, as a layman,
reading “Everyone is a Product Manager 2.0” did broaden my horizons a bit.
But it’d be even better if everyone were a programmer XD