What Game of Thrones has taught me about Product Management

Whenever I meet someone new for the first time, after a bit of small talk, the other person will eventually end up asking two very predictable questions – Where do you work and what do you do?

I can talk about Raygun until the cows come home, but answering “what do you do” is a completely different story, because I know as soon as I say, “Product Management”, people are going to get confused!

What I used to say

I used to tackle this question head on by highlighting the tactical things that I do, as the VP of Product at Raygun:

• I make sure we build things that people actually want to use
• I’m our customers’ champion inside the business (and I talk to them all the time)
• I create the product strategy
• I create and execute the product roadmap

The problem with this approach is that the other person in the conversation will end up either:

• Being horribly confused, because they’ve gone ahead and listed all of the roles inside a company that sounded like what you say you do but you are still saying that’s not what you do (i.e. “Sounds like Customer Success”, “So you are a marketer” etc)
• Making an excuse to escape the awkward silence so they don’t have to keep talking to you (or look stupid by asking too many questions)

Either way, it’s not a good outcome for everyone involved.

Making Product Management cool again

Jock Busuttil, the author of The Practioner’s Guide to Product Management suggests that you shouldn’t tell people you are a Product Manager at all. He answers this question by saying he’s a dolphin trainer. So lately, I’ve been AB testing my answer to this question by saying:

“Raygun is a futurist company that makes ray guns for the robot uprising that we predict will happen in the next 10–20 years. My job as the VP of Product is to make sure that our ray guns are easy to use, looks sleek, does the job well and makes a cool noise whenever they are fired by our robot overlords.”

Personally, I found this to be a much more interesting story!

The beginning of a new narrative

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to use storytelling to make Product Management and its core principles more memorable and easier to understand for non-Product people, so I’ve come up with a fun new Product Management narrative that I hope other Product Managers will adopt.

But before you continue reading, I have to warn you to use this narrative with caution (and not take it at face value or trust everything I’m about to tell you), because every Product Manager and business is different.

So here we go…

Product Management is like…

“So Zheng, what does a Product Manager actually do (at Raygun)?”

Well working as a Product Manager in a high-growth company is a lot like being in Game of Thrones, in that:

• There are many building blocks/teams/players in the game (marketing, engineering, product, sales, customer success etc), everyone thinks they are rightful leader of the realm
• At any given time, one or more of these building blocks/teams are on fire, or at least are smouldering (competition, competency, resourcing)
• If you are a Product Manager, you are Daenerys Targaryen, in that you are at the epicentre of the game and are usually surrounded by burning buildings or people.
• There is too much to do and not enough time/money/expertise to do all of it at once. Every day problems crop up that are Most Important And Urgent Ever.
• So you are left trapped by burning buildings and the urge is strong to save them all and solve all the things but you can’t.