Find Your Product Management Valentine

Product Managers are never alone on Valentine's Day (or any other day of the year). This is because you're always working with other people, communicating and collaborating and convincing.

You know how to get along with everyone you need to in order to move your product along, but in the depths of your heart, there are some people you like working with better than others. It's okay to admit! We won't tell anyone.

So, spill. What kind of teammate makes you excited to show up for work in the morning? If you could handpick your Product Team from a crowd of accomplished Product Professionals, who would you click with the most? It's time to play Product Management matchmaking!

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The Global Product Pro

The Global Product Pro is straightforward. She's straight-to-the-point, gets the job done, and uses her superpower of Project Management to execute and deliver. In fact, the only person who can rival her organization skills is you (you bonded over office supplies in your very first meeting). You can envision your work life with her...

It's a Friday afternoon. You just had a Product launch the day before and you've spent the whole day troubleshooting and analyzing initial metrics. 4:45pm rolls around and Global Product Pro logs out of her email. You crack a couple jokes about data, and then you don't talk again until Monday morning. And you wouldn't have it any other way.

The Disruptive Product Dynamo

You're the kind of PM who is focused on what you have in front of you. Sure, you love a good Product Vision, but you're focused on delivering short- to mid-term customer outcomes. Then, the Disruptive Product Dynamo comes into your life.

Sure, she isn't the most organized. Sometimes you start to sweat when you think about how much work needs to happen to deliver on her Big Ideas. But she makes you excited about the possibility of what your product could be, in a way you never have been before. Even if her idea isn't feasible in this sprint, or even this year, she has a knack for connecting real-world advances to your product and creating immediate value for users. You keep her grounded, and she keeps you dreaming. You make the perfect duo.

The Product Wizard

The Product Wizard is good and he knows it. You're a bit intimidated by his self-assuredness and worldliness, but he takes you under his wing. Together, you conduct hundreds of customer interviews, schedule Zoom to accommodate every possible time zone, and make surprising discoveries about user behavior in different cultural contexts.

You know he'll always respond to your Slack, and he always has an insight into why local adoption isn't working as planned. Soon enough, you find yourself making the same kinds of predictions, and you realize that thanks to his mentorship you've reached a deep understanding of your product's global market.

The Cool Product Crafter

You weren't too sure about the Cool Product Crafter when you first met. All your engineers warned you about her, saying that she was always slowing down velocity with user focus groups. At first you felt the same. You relied on your engineering background and focused on getting the features out on time — until one day, you launch a product with zero adoption. You identified the issue and realize that the Cool Product Crafter had flagged this in the first round of user research. Listening to her then would have saved you so much time and effort! After that, you began to trust her opinion more.

Now, all you two talk about is Users, users, users. You catch your devs rolling their eyes when you finish each other's sentences. You don't mind. She's shown you the beauty of user-centered design, and you never want to go back.

The Product Guru

You accepted the position on the Product Guru's team because he's exactly the kind of Product Leader you want to be in 10 years. Communicative, knowledgable, and calm in a crisis, he has seen his fair share of product successes and failures. He has one eye on his team, one eye on the business, and somehow another eye on the customers.

You learn every day from his leadership style, and love grabbing beers after work to get into the nitty gritty of his philosophy on what it means to be a good Product Manager.

Alone on Valentine's Day?

Okay okay, we know. You can still feel alone even if you're surrounded by people. And depending on the size of your company, you might be the only Product Manager there! If one of the profiles resonated with you, but you find yourself without the possibility of a Product Manager match, consider this: Maybe you are the Product Manager you've been looking for.