I recently shipped the biggest feature I have ever shipped.
In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t even that big, but I wrote the first version of the product requirements in February 2020 and the feature was announced to the world in April 2021. The gestational period of this thing was longer than that of an actual child.
Since the launch, I’ve had time to breathe and reflect on the process, and wanted to capture an insight I had today. Bear with me because in hindsight it seems obvious.
There were many times during this feature’s ideation, design, execution, and launch where I wondered if I was making my life more difficult than it had to be. My style of work is to be omnipresent; working closely with every cross-functional team, making sure that every aspect of the feature meets a standard that I feel proud of.
For this feature specifically, I dug into the weeds and made it my business to know and refine every single detail. A few examples
- I reviewed all user-facing command line errors
- I asked for the expansion of clickable area of a button in the UI
- I ran python scripts on virtual machine images to flag open source dependencies
- I maintained a list of every person who asked via Slack/email when the feature was coming or cited customer interest, and reached out to them periodically with updates
I never thought doing any of this made me a better product manager. Honestly, I just thought it made me a more anal, stressed out one. But this morning, I read a post by the brilliant Ken Norton called Building Products at Stripe and realized that having “taste” (or a “good aesthetic” as I like to call it) which manifests itself as dedication to getting all of the details right is in fact a marketable skill.
Maybe this was obvious to you already, but it was a revelation for me. I always thought my attention to detail was a hindrance, or a sign of my inexperience. My inner monologue went something like
“Senior PMs don’t have the time to do review all the documentation”
“You’re missing the forest for the trees”
But there’s a time and place for everything! At this stage of my career, I need to focus on the trees and get really good at it before I can wax poetic about the forest. Plus if the company culture is truly a fit, this skill will be recognized and valued as well.