Matt LeMay on the four principles of product management

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: The connective nature of product management, “no work above, no work below,” and the importance of talking to people who aren’t your customers.

This week, I sit down with Matt LeMay, product coach, consultant, and author of Product Management in Practice. We talk about the four guiding principles of product management, what he has learned about himself as a product manager, and how to conduct meaningful research.

Defining product management

To me, being a product manager is all about being the connective tissue, the glue that connects whatever the different roles are within your organization. The specific organizational roles might vary, depending on where you are. You might be working more closely with technical people. You might be working more closely with marketing people, but whoever those different players are, your job as product manager is to be the aligner in chief or translator in chief, the person who is ultimately responsible and accountable for everybody having a shared language and a shared sense of purpose.

CORE product management skills

The four guiding principles came out of the four CORE skills, which is an acronym for communication, organization, research, and execution. I wrote a piece on Medium a few years ago, which was my attempt to challenge the traditional three-way Venn diagram of product management with business, technology, and UX. Having worked at a lot of enterprises and companies where people might not actually be that close to the technology side or might not be thinking about user experience as a day-to-day concern, I felt like those three areas captured a common set of subject matter knowledge that product managers will encounter, but not the actual skills they'll need to connect between those different subject matter ideas. Some people commented and rightly pointed out that something seemed to be missing from it.

That thing seemed to be an element of research, or the ability to actually glean information from the outside world. Erika Hall, in the book Just Enough Research, says that, "Research is just applied critical thinking," which I love as a way of defining research. I like using the word ‘research’ because it also makes it clear that it's not just about being smart; it's about actually doing the work of seeking out alternate perspectives, and explanations, and ideas. These four skills—communication, organization, research, and execution—each one comes with a guiding principle, and I stand by these four guiding principles. For communication, the guiding principal is clarity over comfort, which is really going back to what I was talking about earlier, about this idea that there are times as a product manager when you will have to state things that might seem painfully obvious or ask questions that you know are wading into really difficult political challenges for the organization, but if there is not absolute clarity in your team and in your organization about what people are working on and why, then you cannot succeed as a product manager.

If people don't know what they're doing and why they're doing it, and know that really clearly, then it doesn't matter how good the thing is that you ship or how quickly you ship it; the team will eventually start to fragment and fall apart because tha