Wait - was my Harvard MBA boss right all along?

How I adopted a different mindset around product management

I was halfway out of my manager’s office. “Product management, after all, is risk mitigation”. I was so close to getting free. In an instant, my boss pulled me back in.

“What the hell?” I asked myself incredulously. Risk management? Product management is innovation! And product launches! And customer discovery! And compelling vision statements!

I spun around and looked at my boss who was sitting in a tall, thick, mahogany desk chair. The chair could easier be mistaken for a throne had we been living in a different time period. He tapped his fingers against the arms of the chair. The chair fit in well with the rest of his office, which was curiously ornate for a tech startup. To be fair, our office was previously a bank and the previous tenants left behind furniture and artwork that looked like the set of Mad Men.

The office vibe was uncomfortable for most of us, but fitting for my manager. He was our Chief Product Officer but also a Harvard Business School alumni and belonged to the associated social club. He could be best described as a classical business leader, the type who referenced and relied on Michael Porter and Peter Drucker. He wore tweed sport coats while the rest of us wore jeans and hoodies. Yet, we all knew he was smart. Probably smarter than anyone else in the office.

Equating product management to risk management was on brand for my manager. I probably grinned a bit after he said it. We chatted for a few more minutes before I left shaking my head, ready to call a customer, run an experiment, review a design. I was desperate to get back to building cool stuff. Because that’s product management, right?

Over the courses of several years, I’d find myself recalling that conversation as I switched jobs, teams, products, strategies. You know what? He was absolutely right. It wasn’t uncommon for me to interrupt a conversation and ask questions like:

• “What’s the risk here? If we do this, what are we not working on?”

• “What’s the risk of us building this and no one ever using this?”

• “What’s the risk of running into technical complexity? Do we have the right resources?”

• “What’s the risk of this cannibalizing our existing business?”

As it seeped in, I realized that the basis for anything that we do in product management is actually about risk management. We chat with customers to mitigate risk that we’re building the wrong thing. We prioritize product quality to mitigate the risk of customers leaving. We craft roadmaps so that our vision is out in the open, transparent, so that we mitigate the risk of the team moving in different directions and losing focus.

Today, my psychology as a product leader is forever changed. I’d like to think, for the better. It may not be the most fun way to look at the world, but looking at the world through the lens of risk is actually more comforting than it sounds. It forces us to ask: Is there a greater opportunity out there we could be working on? Is there a risk embedded in our communications? Is there risk in how we build products? Is there risk with the way we construct a team? Manage a team? Is there risk in a new market entrant disrupting our business?

Living your professional life through a defensive, paranoid mindset might seem unsettling. But the opposite - building recklessly, being stubborn about a vision, ignoring competitive forces, etc. - is far more frightening.

Product management isn’t for cowboys. Product management is best suited for actuaries. For the academics. Minimizing risk is the best path to achieving the outcome we strive for each day: maximizing value.