Product management therapy
working in an isolated role and talking to people 2026-10-13 #product
When I switched from development to product management, the work became more sociable but also more isolated. As a product manager, you work with everyone: your stakeholders include customers, management, sales, customer support, designers, and developers. But while you work with them, you don’t work on shared tasks in the same way that developers do.
Developer collaboration
When I worked as a developer, a team typically had 2–7 developers who shared a backlog. Everyone worked on everything, where possible, with some specialisation, such as front-end development. However, although we partitioned responsibility for large systems into separate development teams, we always had more than one developer working on each component.
Developers all like working with each other. If they hate each other, they exchange passive-aggressive written code reviews. If they like each other, they may try pair programming, or even team programming, if all of them like each other. These become the kind of bonding experiences that you might miss, if you switch to an isolated role.
Product collaboration
When I worked for medium-sized companies, with several product managers, we didn’t actually talk to each other much. We discussed company-level topics, but rarely collaborated on our product-specific work. As a product manager, you work constantly with people in other roles, and infrequently with other product managers. You work across role boundaries, not inside one.
When I did work on something with another product manager, that usually meant coaching each other on a technique that one of us knew better, such as opportunity-solution tree modelling, or user story mapping. Even then, we applied the technique to (part of) a product that only belonged to one of us.
Team partitioning
If a team of product managers worked like developers, they would share responsibility for a product, and any one of them might start the next product initiative. We didn’t work like that, of course. Organisations with more than one product manager assign them strictly separate responsibilities, typically one well-defined aspect of a product, or one product in a portfolio.
Product partitioning creates focus – a powerful product management tool. But this focus also creates isolation. Among six product managers, say, we had little shared context for each other’s day-to-day work.
Product management therapy
In my first product role, I soon realised that talking to product managers resembles talking to customers. I had to get out of the building. I had plenty of developers to talk to at work, but I needed to meet other companies’ product people.
Around the same time, a colleague and I evaluated product management tools for our team. For ProdPad, I signed up for a product management therapy session with CEO Janna Bastow, which I assume she approached as product discovery. That half hour felt like a revelation about how we should talk to each other, as product managers. (Sadly, I never did get to adopt ProdPad.)
Next time you find yourself reading a product management book that doesn’t resonate, or missing shared experience with a colleague, consider some self-care. Find some product managers, and ask who wants to join a product management therapy session.
