Good vs. Bad Product Managers (per Ben Horowitz)

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Ben Horowitz is a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He was the CEO of Opsware before he became a VC – so he has real-world operating experience as well, and I follow his blog regularly.

I was reading one of his recent posts, which linked to a document titled “Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager”. Ben wrote it when he was the Director of Product Management at Netscape. The purpose of the document was to share his expectations with product managers in his team.

Even though it was written during a simpler, happier time (1996!) – it is still very relevant today. Read on for the link to Ben’s PDF and my favorite part of the document…

My Favorite Part of the Document

The whole document is excellent – but my favorite part is:

Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is building. Good product managers define good products that can be executed with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve the hardest problem).

Here is the link to Ben’s PDF – check it out. Whether you’re a Director or VP of Product Management (i.e. responsible for managing product managers), or a Product Manager yourself – the PDF is an excellent read.

Editor’s Note:
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Michael Shrivathsan

I'm your author, Michael Shrivathsan, an expert in product management with successful experience at several innovative companies in Silicon Valley, USA over the past two decades. I'm also a USPTO patent recipient. For my day job, I'm the VP of Product Management at Accompa, we make the popular requirements management software used by Product Management, Business Analysis, and related teams.

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