Blog
Traditional product management, more akin to “farming”, is truly useless in the early stages of a product-focused venture, and especially before achieving the highly-sought-after Product-Market Fit (PMF).
Yet, it’s also the other way around; what you do before achieving PMF is not anymore what you need to do after you achieve it.
Pre-PMF Product Management in a post-PMF phase = curtailed growth.
Post-PMF Product Mananagement in a pre-PMF phase is the same as “playing house”; you are spending time “managing” something that has not reached a viable form yet as if it’s already a stable, multimillion-dollar product line. By spending your time on this instead of on pursuing PMF, the product has zero chances to even conceptually mature for early adopters.
The more mutable the product, the more the boundary between pre- and post-PMF PM phases and required skillset becomes blurry, and the more experience required to wear the right hat for the right challenge at the right time.
It really helps to have seen both sides of the PMF “moment”.
