9 Perspectives that Distinguish a Good Product Manager
- Michael Amenta
- Aug 8, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 29, 2025
Product management can be famously difficult to explain. Some PMs describe themselves as the “CEO of a company-within-a-company", but they may actually be perceived as more of a Chandler Bing—a complete vocational unknown, which may lead to one expressing their job function more directly:
Without proper definition, it's difficult to have evaluation criteria for benchmarking. To remedy this, here are four PM pillars—explained by nine unexpected voices—that can be used to measure product management success:
Ideation -> Albert Einstein
Prioritization, in two parts:
Selection -> Arthur Conan Doyle
Perseverance -> Helmuth von Moltke the Elder modernized by Mike Tyson
Humility, in two parts:
Open-mindedness -> Niels Henrik David Bohr modernized by a very successful entrepreneur of the 2000s & 2010s
Doubt -> Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Unreasonableness -> George Bernard Shaw and Anthony Bourdain
Ideation
It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer. Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character. - Albert Einstein
If you are one thing as a product manager, you’re a problem solver. Each corporate job function solves problems but, in most cases, there’s an established playbook on how to perform the job function at a given company.
PMs, on the other hand, are expected to solve problems that are undefined and constantly changing, without specific instructions on how to solve them. In fact, the best PMs know that before doing anything, they must dedicate time and effort to identify the specific problem to align stakeholders on what a solution might look like.
From there, PMs must foster discovery of solutions using ambiguous and siloed data that sometimes hasn’t even been collected yet. And, of course, there isn’t just one solution—there are infinite possible market solutions to any given problem that all yield vastly different results. How do you choose the best one?
Einstein’s quote is helpful here because it illustrates that dedication and passion are the key to the development of ideas and the ambiguity that follows.
Prioritization 1: Selection
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data; never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details; there is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. - Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle)
As one surpasses the first year in a product role, they may develop a sense of knowing what needs to be built next. Many experiences have accumulated that cause opinions to form and harden. However, when forced to validate a proposed idea with data, I’ve found that the data frequently fails to support my opinions with the same conviction.
Even though product managers are ingrained with significant subject matter expertise by virtue of their proximity to the product and its problems, they must never lose discipline in how they determine the problem to solve, and then how to solve it. Follow Holmes' lead and ensure that direction begins with data.
Prioritization 2: Perseverance
No plan survives first contact with the enemy. - Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. - Mike Tyson
Unfortunately, the results of your product release will not go according to plan, which is why Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) are necessary to adapt to market realities.
But there’s another kernel of wisdom in these quotes with regard to the inevitable assaults against your product concepts. The pre-development process takes time, and throughout it, you’ll be bombarded with new, “high-priority” requests that stakeholders want immediately. To be an effective product manager, you must know how to roll with these punches—to know how and when to not reprioritize in the face of these distractions.
I’ve witnessed many blink in this environment. The norm at many companies has been to start an initiative and then abandon it when someone senior gets more excited about the next new thing (or “critical emergency"). If you give in to these distractions and say ‘yes’ too often, very little will get built because feature requests often arrive faster than you can build them. In other words: when everything is prioritized, nothing is. Strategy goes out the window in this environment and impact, morale, and trust erode.
To prevent this, a product manager must be a staunch defender against distraction even in the face of more senior sponsors.
Fortunately, there are a few methods to help align with such stakeholders:
Find out why a feature is requested. If you keep asking why enough times, you'll get to the root of the problem and to a more elegant solution that solves multiple problems simultaneously.
Remind sponsors that, if you build their newest request, the last commitment can’t be finished by the promised deadline. If your roadmap is prioritized by impact, effort, strategic alignment, and dependency removal, then bumping your top priority should be costly to other stakeholders.
Establish the rule that new data of significant value are required for roadmap changes. In the majority of cases, new data of significant importance hasn’t suddenly entered the picture—it’s more likely that a heated phone call was just held on an issue that’s already known. In other words, your stakeholder is falling prey to recency bias. Re-contextualize the stakeholder with relevant data to avoid falling victim to the same cognitive error.
Disseminate your squad’s vision statement, core KPIs, and strategic priorities. If the new request doesn’t fit with your squad’s reason for being or its strategy, then you shouldn’t invest in it.
Humility 1: Open-mindedness
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. - Niels Bohr
You should take the approach that you’re wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong. - very successful entrepreneur of the 2000s & 2010s
Like most people, I like to think I have good ideas. Unfortunately, in hindsight, my first idea is usually (read: always) rubbish. Fortunately, the end output is more often successful because open-mindedness allows the evolution of ineffective ideas into better solutions.
As a PM, you benefit from a network of specialist resources—technical experts on the development team, consequence experts in QA, usability experts in design, customer experts in user insights, revenue experts in marketing, sales, or strategy, etc. Leverage them to help evolve your idea into something better.
Take the advice above and assume you’re wrong, or uncertain, in every aspect of your idea. To make super-powered amalgamation of diverse expertise, your ideas must evolve with others’ input.
Humility 2: Doubt, not Certainty
In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away... - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It’s paramount to keep certainty at bay even after your ideas have been bolstered by others. After all, this super idea hasn’t been validated in the real world; it remains a hypothesis at best.
To apply doubt is to use "lean", or "agile", product development practices. Embrace the lessons of The Lean Startup and maximize agility, what isn’t built, collaboration, and user-validated MVPs. In addition to ensuring your products are shipped faster, lean development also creates a virtuous, rapid cycle of test-and-learn that provides valuable real-world data for your next build.
Look to the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and be ruthlessly true to the words "minimum viable". Keep removing features and infrastructure until there’s nothing left to remove that will eliminate your core premise.
Be unreasonable
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -George Bernard Shaw
There are two general types of stretch goals—those that shoot for ~20% improvements and those that shoot for ~10x improvements. You must target the latter to be far more likely to achieve remarkable results.
However, it's often not possible to target 10x improvements within the confines of your local product. You have to target changes to the larger system and changes to how external teams operate. Unfortunately, persuading another team to change (or convincing a leader to force another team to change) is not often welcome. For this, it's wise to invest in communication skills to improve your persuasiveness.
But even then, you can be viewed as stepping over the line; as being unreasonable. Being seen as unreasonable isn't pleasant, but George Bernard Shaw's logic is sound. And while the unreasonable person is not universally liked, it is unwise to strive to be liked by all.
Fortunately, it's possible to be kind without being liked. So put yourself out there and be unreasonable, while being kind, and you will open the door to uncommon impact.
Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things ... and act like an idiot ... we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund. -Anthony Bourdain
Closing thought
There it is. If you want to be an effective product manager, you must: ideate well, ruthlessly prioritize by selecting well and persevering in your choices, be humble by being open-minded and rejecting certainty, and lastly, be unreasonable. Good luck and happy solving!
Oh, and if you prefer memes to words, here's a similar overview in picture form.