The product genius myth

On not shipping your ego

Product is a competitive field. To get the best jobs, even the most exceptional product people need to make themselves stand out. Once in the job, they have to justify their “resource deployment” of expensive, intelligent engineers. Their egos jump in to their defense, and the egomaniacs end up running product.

We like to believe the product genius myth: that products are the invention of a solo mastermind like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. Product people are supposed to be visionaries. Not only should they have answers to everything, they should have the most sound, first principles-driven, perfect answer to everything. (Bonus points if this answer publicly destroys someone else’s opinion - what a genius!)

Supervillian bio: Brainiac's intelligence allows for unthinkable calculation abilities, an enhanced memory and an advanced understanding of mechanical engineering, bio-engineering, physics and countless other theoretical and applied sciences, as well as extensive knowledge of various advanced alien technologies. (Addition: Worked at Uber, Airbnb, Stripe.)

Are you a product genius? Let’s see some of the behaviors:

1. Insistent on making the decision; resistant to any alternatives.

2. Spends lots of time alone; presents ideas with the expectation that everyone will unanimously agree with the foolproof logic.

3. Organizes everything to their personal liking, at the cost of everyone else’s productivity (or sanity).

4. Torments candidates in interviews; only chimes in to discussions to outsmart someone else.

5. Defends positions vehemently. Gets flustered three whys? into a discussion.

Spoiler: No one wants to work with this person.

Product is a team game

While there are some brilliant creators and thinkers in the field, this myth hides the fact that products are delivered by teams, by dozens or hundreds of contributors. While product is often the face of the project, they do little of the real work (e.g. writing code, architecting systems, designing interactions). Instead they do all the other boring stuff to make the work simply work.

Let’s say you are effective as a solo decision maker. Once you’re managing multiple product lines or teams, you become a bottleneck and can’t scale. Congrats, your ego has won out and now you make 100% of decisions, but your product suffers. To counter this, you need to think about highest order outcomes and constantly find ways to remove yourself from the process. (Related: Applying Leverage as a Product Manager)

Everybody egos

Even though we may not behave like supergeniuses or egomaniacs, each of us is subject to ego-driven thinking. The ego protects our self-image from anything that might be painful or challenge the status quo. It hates other peoples’ opinions or any derivations from the master plan.

This has subtle effects on your ability to do product, whether you suffer from the obvious signs above or not. The ego often:

1. Blinds you from the important things you could be working on versus the ones that will increase your status.

2. Prevents you from considering great ideas that didn’t come from your own brain.

3. Makes you focus on appearing successful on surface, instead of being successful in the weeds.

4. Leads you to fix other people’s problems (or emergencies) to show them how valuable you are. Why bother with the hard work they don’t see?

5. Makes you avoid conflict or any hard conversations about your precious ideas.

Get uncomfortable

“Dropping the ego” is easier said than done. Changing your thinking is humbling and will take time. Start by reflecting on your own thinking and identifying some approaches for handling these blind spots.

A simple, tactical example: I avoid making any decision on the spot in front of people. I know that I tend to make crappy, fear-driven calls in the moment and only see issues objectively hours or even minutes later. Just hanging up the zoom will let my ego to stop clenching. Pay attention to your own instincts and behaviors and you’ll see these patterns play out.

When you let go of your ego, you’ll realize some important truths:

1. Looking dumb is uncomfortable but necessary. Asking questions everyone else is afraid to is painful now, but prevents disasters later.

2. You don’t really build anything. You are kind of like a coach: you might create gameplan, run practices, but you don’t get to step on the field. You are only successful by making the team successful. That’s quite alright.

3. You don’t get to take credit for anything. It’s a good thing, because it doesn’t last long anyway. Your product’s and team’s ongoing health matter more than one-off hits and praise.

4. You’re more creative as a vessel for ideas than as an imagination machine. Your range of possibilities and inspiration sources will have a step change improvement when you realize you don’t need to be brilliant on your own. Ideas already come from everywhere - you just can’t see most of them.

5. You will win more favor by delivering long term results than by always presenting super tight ideas but failing to ship them.

There are enough product geniuses out there. Drop the shield and get uncomfortable. You’ll see that many obstacles are entirely of your own making.