Your Job is Contradictions
Product management requires impossible things. You can't resolve these contradictions—you can only get better at holding both sides.
Your Job is Contradictions
The truth: Product management requires impossible things:
- •Care deeply AND be ready to kill your work
- •Be confident in decisions AND stay open to being wrong
- •Build with passion AND maintain detachment
- •Seek improvement constantly AND don't be self-destructive
- •Have strong opinions AND hold them loosely
What this means: You can't resolve these contradictions. You can only get better at holding both sides. The discomfort of managing these tensions is the job.
The maturity: Junior PMs try to resolve the contradictions. Senior PMs accept them and focus on navigating the tension skillfully.
The outcome: You'll spend your whole career getting better at this. The PMs who do this well aren't more comfortable with the contradictions—they're just more accepting of the discomfort.