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Selling Hope

This post was met with a lot of enthusiasm in my network and made me smile when I saw it. It is the unvarnished truth about a product manager's life. What you want to make possible versus what you actually can is so far apart that they are two different things entirely. You start with one vision and narrative about what the product will do and be. Reality strikes and you start paring back one feature at a time until you have the infamous MVP that is horrible outcome of several dozen compromises in none of which the product manager or their vision prevailed. Now, all this has to be dressed up as something worth for the engineers to rally around an build. 

You cannot motivate a team to do their best work if they know they will be delivering something ugly, deficient and unlovable destined to hobble along for very many releases until it has a better life. That does not get people energized. And so this lovely bit of wisdom from the trenches on what purpose a product roadmap is meant to serve. Anyone in the line of work will feel better reading this just to know that they are not alone in the world dealing with shit for infrastructure where absolutely nothing is easy or simple. Rookies make the mistake of thinking that something is and pay dearly for their naiveté. They learn in time to assume nothing, question everything and test to death just to be sure. 

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