I have had the privilege to interact and work with many product managers and product management aspirants. I have always been curious to hear about their notion of what is the role of a product manager. From the outside, it is perceived to be a very glamorous hat to wear (read mini-CEOs) which is very different from the ground reality. More on that for another post.

A common notion I hear while listening to a lot of the product management aspirants is that a product manager gets to execute all of his ideas around the product. What no one really talks about is that ideas are no one’s monopoly and especially not so of the product manager. If a PM is carrying such a notion, he would not be open to listening to his peers and more so from his juniors. I’ll be honest, I did too carry this same thought early on in my career.

Product Managers should excel in distilling the core problem, not necessarily in finding the right solution. Nor should the PMs be very attached to their ideas. The job is to solve a problem for the users of the product and not to make sure all of your ideas are executed.

Now the natural question would be - if not PMs, who is the source of ideas? The answer is - everyone around you - if only you are open to listening and have invested efforts in creating an environment conducive enough for ideas to freely flow. It could be your customers, the engineers, the business team members, the operations folks, the customer experience force, the admin person, just about anybody.

An idea can come from anywhere if the core problem is communicated clearly. You could have an abundance of solutions to the problem and some of them would be so simple that often times you would realize ‘why was I complicating it so much?’.

I was conducting a ‘Product Discovery’ workshop recently around a new product which we were conceptualizing. The participants included business teams, engineers, product managers, product designers, quality analysts, Agile coaches, etc. Before the workshop, my team had collated a list of use cases as a part of their research. At the end of the workshop, we ended up with 5x the number of use cases and ideas which we would have otherwise never thought of in our individual capacity.

Final word - it’s not wrong to have this willingness to have one’s ideas executed. The key is to be open. You will be surprised at the kind of ideas which can come from the most unexpected sources that can add much more delight to the customer’s product experience.