#141: on PM-ing, the mainstream, and the power of generalists

This letter is shorter than how the title indicates

Helloo, my 13101 subscribers!

Looking back seems to provide a good sense of achievement. I wrote this "Support Me" page a few years ago, when there were only about 2800 eyeballs reading my blog every week. I have always known and tracked my subscriber count ever since, but having an anchor point in the past tells me how far I've gone. I want to spend this moment feeling proud, and to encourage you to do the same for yourself. Again, dedication is something sexy.

I want to share what has been going on in my life in the past few months.

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I like the new job - it's good to be back as a real PM. It's intellectually challenging. My scope feels borderless. I'm given almost full autonomy and a strong sense of purpose. My job now is to attain mastery - the final missing piece in the intrinsic motivation equation. I feel overwhelmed at times, but it's good overwhelmed.

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It turns out this self-driven, set-your-own-damn-goal-then-achieve-it kinda style is alien to many. It gave a few of my friends a good shock. I'm saying good because it makes me feel like I'm doing something different, something unusual. Not that I feel better than them, it's just that being different always means a great deal to me. Maybe the difference is the kind of validation I seek. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have an easy time with extreme autonomy at the beginning.

I deleted Threads a few weeks ago because I feel like a slow-boiled frog using it. It's where all the mainstream thoughts and opinions are praised, or I would say enforced (via likes and reshares). All those asking for relationship advice, and all those seemingly experts who might have been through no serious relationship telling the author to resort to extreme solutions. Everything is so single-dimensional. Advice is given without full context and based purely on publicly approved practices. Just like Threads' logo: there's only black and white there, either you are very right or you are dead wrong. There are no other flavors. One would not realize its impact until they actually think like the mainstream - at that point, I'd have become a completely boiled frog, but also with the condition that they have good self-reflection.

I resonate strongly with The Fountainhead by Any Rand for the exact same reason I deleted Threads.

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I started to get over the fear of my own "Senior" title. My "end users" is the hero of the day. I care less about making a "senior" decision, and more about a "how can this bring value to my users". I realize a good grasp of user problems can be a great confidence booster and defense strategy when talking to Leads. If I talk solutions, I will immediately be bashed with tons of questions and pushbacks from goodwill to protect the as-is. If I talk about user problems, I will raise empathy and possibly some bias for immediate actions to remediate. I don't think finding user problems is hard. The hard part is to prove that such a user problem is worth solving now, and that feels to me more of an art than a science. We've got to know where the attention currently is. Saying that "this problem is endured by tens of thousands of our customers" may sound jeopardizing, but it may not get us anywhere, because there's a common reaction "but they are still paying us millions, so that doesn't seem like a big enough problem". But saying that "this problem is going to be one of the reasons our multi-million-dollar prospect cannot adopt our product and hinder our company-wide expansion strategy" defo sounds juicier. I had fallen for the trap of "all the best for our current users" and focused on things suffered by the majority, but which might not necessarily propel the company. At the end of the day, PMs, just like any other jobs, are hired to help the company move up and forward.

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I've observed something quite interesting at my new company. Those who do sports tend to do more than one. I use "sports" as a very generic term here. Badminton players also participate in pickleball. Tennis players also play football. Poker, swim. Table tennis, foosball. A lot play more than two, even up to four or five at a time (!). I doubt spreading yourself thin is a good recipe for specialization, but it’s not what I want to discuss here. I wonder how having a wide range of sports skills affects one's life. I tend to “accidentally” put myself into the same table where I can talk to those generalists to have a feel of their thought process. The most noticeable thing I can tell you right now is that they tend to be very confident. There's this underlying can-do attitude in all of them. It gives me a feeling that I can entrust this person with whatever problems I throw at them, they can figure it out by themselves. Maybe it's the power of generalists - not in what they know, unlike specialists - but in the contagious sense of security and optimism they bring to the table.

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Aite, I will go for my noodle luncheon now. I hope yours is better than noodles.

Take care, and have a great week ahead!

Tuấn Mon