Modelling Product Management

I like this as a model of product management. It shows me precisely the area in which I’m lacking skills currently: business & strategy. At the moment, I don’t even know what I don’t know in this area that is going to help me be successful.

It’s from a Quora response here. The quote that goes along with it caught my eye too:

In technology, particularly software, understanding these 4 areas (Business & Strategy, Technology & Design, Domain Knowledge, Systems and Process Thinking) and applying them in the right ways will lead to that success. Choose any 3 and you might be successful in the short term, but not in the long term. Choose only 2 and you’ll almost certainly fail.

As Quora answers go, it’s not a fantastically popular one. But as I mentioned, it does serve to highlight what I’m already fairly convinced I don’t know.

Having worked on agile teams delivering software for the last 10 years or so, I’m pretty comfortable with the technology and design side of things. Likewise systems and process thinking; at least to some reasonable extent. I’m certainly not saying there’s not room for improvement.

I’m fortunate to be working on a testing product, so – domain knowledge, check!

Business though, is not an area in which I have any qualifications whatsoever really. So I reckon this is the area I’m going to be focusing most of my learning efforts in the immediate future.

I’ve also had analytics and data science in my sights for a while now. Hopefully there’ll be some decent overlap.

Reading and course recommendations welcomed!

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out via a comment or on the socials if anything resonates.

Cheers,
Simon