One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine.

But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.

Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn. He showed the same level of attention to every piece of hardware, every word on the packaging. That’s how we learned the level of detail that was expected at Apple. And that’s what we started to expect of ourselves.

As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

5.5. The Point of PMs

“Product manager or product marketing manager—Product marketing and product management are essentially the same thing—or at least they should be. A product manager’s responsibility is to figure out what the product should do and then create the spec (the description of how it will work) as well as the messaging (the facts you want customers to understand). Then they work with almost every part of the business (engineering, design, customer support, finance, sales, marketing, etc.) to get the product spec’d, built, and brought to market. They ensure that it stays true to its original intent and doesn’t get watered down along the way. But, most importantly, product managers are the voice of the customer. They keep every team in check to make sure they don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal—happy, satisfied customers.

A good product manager will do a little of everything and a great deal of all this:

• Spec out what the product should do and the road map for where it will go over time.

• Determine and maintain the messaging matrix.

• Work with engineering to get the product built according to spec.

• Work with design to make it intuitive and attractive to the target customer.

• Work with marketing to help them understand the technical nuances in order to develop effective creative to communicate the messaging.

• Present the product to management and get feedback from the execs.

• Work with sales and finance to make sure this product has a market and can eventually make money.

• Work with customer support to write necessary instructions, help manage problems, and take in customer requests and complaints.

• Work with PR to address public perceptions, write the mock press release, and often act as a spokesperson.

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing writes the messaging—the facts you want to communicate to customers—and gets the product sold.

But from my experience that’s a grievous mistake. Those are, and should always be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you’re telling shapes the thing you’re making. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.]

I learned storytelling from Steve Jobs.

I learned product management from Greg Joswiak.

Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower—the superpower of every truly great product manager—is empathy.

He doesn’t just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. He can shake off his deep, geeky knowledge of the product and use it like a beginner, like a regular person. You’d be surprised how many product managers skip that hugely necessary step—listening to their customers, gaining insights, empathizing with their needs, then actually using the product in the real world. But for Joz, it’s the only way.

So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs—except one: battery life.

Nobody wanted their iPod to die in the middle of a flight or as they were DJing a party or going for a run. But as the product evolved from the classic iPod to the iPod Nano, we were in a constant tug-of-war—the smaller and more elegant it became, the less room there was for a battery. But what’s the point of a thousand songs in your pocket if you have to keep taking them out of your pocket to recharge?

One charge had to last days, not hours.

Battery life mattered to customers. And it mattered to Steve Jobs. You couldn’t just come to Steve and say, “The next version of the iPod is going to have a twelve-hour battery instead of fifteen like the last version.” You’d get thrown out of the meeting.

So Joz and I didn’t bring Steve numbers—we brought him customers. Commuters like Sarah only use the iPod going to and from work, students like Tom use it throughout the day, but in short bursts between classes or basketball games.

We created typical customer personas, then walked through the moments in their life when they used their iPods—while jogging, at parties, in the car. And we showed Steve that even if the number engineering gave us was twelve hours, those twelve hours actually lasted most people all week long.

The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context.

Joz always, always understood the context and was able to turn it into an effective narrative. It’s how we were able to convince Steve. And reporters. And customers. It’s how we could sell iPods.

So the product manager has to be a master negotiator and communicator. They have to influence people without managing them. They have to ask questions and listen and use their superpower—empathy for the customer, empathy for the team—to build bridges and mend road maps.