In my 20+ year career in product management for B2B enterprise companies, I have seen product managers at every level make a certain kind of mistake. It is so easy to make that I occasionally make it myself when I'm not careful. What is this mistake? It is to spend too much time on tasks and deliverables that are not core to the product function, which is to to determine and define products to be built. If you keep falling into this trap then ultimately you can't be effective at your job and your company won't sell compelling products. Your primary job as a product manager is to figure out what your market and customers need and make sure it gets built. If you aren't careful, you can spend all of your time performing tasks in support of products such as sales enablement, customer success, product marketing, and pre-sales. How Do You Know This Is Happening? It is easy to fall into this trap for many reasons. Here are a few scenarios that come to mind: Product Marketing
Lessons after 20+ years in the product trenches