Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsMostly wind
Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2024
The premise had so much promise, but this book ultimately disappointed me for many reasons.
1.) Woefully shallow. The manager interviews come only from salarymen/salarywomen PMs in big companies, without in-depth storytelling or insight into their design process and imagination. Most interviews last just 3-5 pages in length, and end up wasting much of them belaboring stakeholder buy-in, bog company bureaucracy, and how their product idea started. There's no value in hearing about this after the fact. Instead, these interviews should talk to people outside big companies, who built businesses around products that they created from scratch, with a small, scrappy team, people who needed to sell their ideas without the benefit of big-company brand or big-company departmental bureaucracy.
2.) Overly focused on titles and roles, nomenclature. We don't need 105 pages and 21 chapters telling us the ideal product team, how many engineers it should contain, and who comes up with the vision. We don't need the next 100 pages pontificating about problems with product roadmaps. Too much fluff and wind. Just cut to the chase and focus on the product design process, iteration, prototyping, proofing, development, delivery, and marketing. You don't need titles to create. It feels like this book was written for a big-company (Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.) entry-level PM with too much time and not enough control on her hands.
3.) Repeated side statements about the difficulty of the role. Endless belaboring of how product management is not a 9-to-5 job. No duh! Preaching to the choir! People who are reading this book want to develop a product, not show up to punch a clock. Inane statements like "let me just say for now that this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths" (42) or "Everything depends on strong products" (195) state the obvious and bequeath such little new knowledge or insight that they could apply to anything or any task within product development. Deeper statements and specificity are put off to "we will discuss this later" without a page number/chapter, or simply shoved under the carpet to move the hand waving along.
4.) Misuse of the English language. The author uses longer, more complicated terms when simpler ones will do. Misnomers abound, like calling product ideation and imagination "discovery," when the word discovery actually means finding new things, like a user searching for apps in the App Store. It doesn't feel like he has a solid grasp of the English language or what laypeople would call products. He incorrectly calls product implementation (coding, etc.) "Delivery" when the word delivery actually means handing something to someone, like a store clerk handing over a product to the customer, or the customer downloading something from the App Store servers. Throwing around terminology like KPIs as if they were the holy grail. Too much incorrect usage of the English language.
5.) The entire structure and direction of the book starts from complaints, complaints, and complaints. Like a disgruntled Adobe PM toiling away on yet another iteration of Photoshop, the writer starts every conversation off with problems seen in the "typical way" or doing something, like a product roadmap, or relationship with engineering. Then he seeks to debunk the myth and provide his optimal way of doing things, leaving out high-level detail gained only by talking to people actually working on the product, like the graphic UI designer or the software engineer. Instead of advocating for working on the product itself, he just recommends taking a CS 101 class, a clear sign of a wanna-be novice technie.
6.) The paper is flimsy, smelly, and cheap. A sharp-tipped ballpoint pen quickly pokes holes through the page while writing. Highlighting bleeds through to the other side. It smells like recycled paper and has a shade of dirty white that makes it hard to read.
Avoid this like the plague. It reads quickly because it is high-level hand-wavy wind, but those in search of deeper, detailed, technical product development insight should look elsewhere.
Working at a tech company on a software product will convey most of this information within a sprint or two.