The discipline of product management is difficult to define. The responsibilities of a product manager can vary dramatically across different companies, industries and company sizes.
“The ambiguity of the product management role is near to its essence.” — Dan Schmidt
However, one skill that is central to good product management, regardless of company or industry, is the ability to deeply understand your customers and users. The very best product managers have deep empathy for their users. They deeply understand their users’ problems, their motivations, their challenges, their goals etc. You cannot build a world-class product without first have this deep understanding of your users.
When a product manager demonstrate a keen ability to understand their users, we say that they have good product taste, or good product judgement. Product taste is often seen as some sort of innate ability. You are either born with it or not. But as Paul Adams and Des Traynor from Intercom point out in this great podcast, it’s not. Product judgement can be learned. It just requires effort.
Building good product judgement takes time, dedication and effort. You need to spend time and effort listening to and observing your users. This can mean hundreds of hours of user research.
Listening to your users is required to build strong product judgement. You can’t skip this step. But, I believe that there’s something else you can do to get you there a bit faster - study history.
Why Study History?
History gets a bad rap because of the way it is taught in school. In school, facts and dates rule. You get a better grade by remembering a historical figure’s date of birth than understanding their personality and the environment in which they lived.
In essence, history is about understanding people and societies. When you study history with this in mind, it becomes fascinating. You cannot gain a full understanding of the American Civil War without gaining an understanding of who Abraham Lincoln was. How did he grow up? What were his interests? What led him to become President? Understanding the person helps us to understand the actions they took and the decisions they made. To truly understand different events throughout history, you must be able to imagine the world in which these events occurred. How did it look? What were the sights and smells? What was society like? What jobs did people have? Were people happy or sad? All of these questions help you to understand why different events took place.
The beauty of history is that it offers this great storehouse of information about different people and societies. History teaches us why people behave in certain ways and why they do the things they do. History helps us to understand people’s thoughts and emotions, all the things that make a person who they are. To me, studying history truly is an exercise in empathy.
Studying history is an exercise in empathy.
When you realise that understanding history comes down to understanding people and the environments in which they lived, it begins to look a lot like product management. The skills you develop while learning about history are directly transferable to becoming a better product manager and building strong product judgement.
Where to Start?
The Black Jacobins is the best book on history I’ve ever read. It almost feels like a disservice to call this book a mere “history book”. It’s incredible. The book is the story of the only successful slave revolt in history and the man behind it, Toussaint L’Ouverture. It gives amazing insight into the society of the time and the motivations of the men and women behind the rebellion. I can’t recommend this book enough, I couldn’t put it down.
I’d also recommend that you watch this short video by The School of Life. The video argues for the importance of understanding history. It explains that history provides us with solutions for many of the problems of today’s world. If that’s not a good enough reason to study history, I don’t know what is.