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.