Aww, thank you! Having a great team all around (PMs, devs, designers) is a big part of what makes it so great and so fun. I am lucky to have all of them. I also hope you get to work with an awesome PM. The PM can really make work hell for developers if they’re bad.

I thought of myself as a shield for my developers until I learned the industry term is “shit umbrella.” And yup, that’s exactly what I try to be for them! Pass through all the good things and reframe the crap I hear into something we can improve.

Not really, but that’s largely because what I consider to be my area of expertise is extremely niche. I am a Lead Product Manager for an internal software. I started out as an IT business analyst for the software literally as soon as it started development out of the proof-of-concept phase. Two years in, I got promoted to Product Manager. Five more years and I’ve had 2 more promotions, growing to the Lead role I have now.

There is only one person at my company whose knowledge of the application rivals my own, and he started out in QA at the same time, then backfilled my BA role when I moved to Product. I know that application inside and out; its upstream dependencies, its users, its place in our business and our technical architecture, etc. And that’s because I’ve had a hand in building it since the beginning.

People I’ve never even met think of my name as synonymous with the software. I am literally the expert on it. My tool touches almost every part of our business and ultimately makes the day-to-day jobs of over 60k people easier. I constantly learn from working on it, and in seven years it has never been boring.

However, I am no longer the only PM for it. I manage a team of 3, and I empower them to run as autonomously as possible. Every year I am less of an expert because it has outgrown what one person can maintain in their head. I use my knowledge to build up my team, and they are becoming powerhouses in their own right. I am proud when I don’t know something in my app, because it means one of my staff owned that feature so wholly that I didn’t need to be closely involved.

Now, what of this knowledge is applicable to a broader industry? I honestly don’t know, and that sometimes freaks me out a bit. I think of Product Management as my vocation, and yet I’ve only ever done it on one team, one product. I take a course every couple years, but otherwise am not super up on generic Product Management skills/trends. However, multiple people who have broader backgrounds working with Product Managers than I do have called me the best PM they’ve ever worked with, so presumably I’ve gotten something right.

Not really an answer to the question as you intended it, I’m sure. But I do think about my role and my expertise in it a lot. And I really love it.

I highly recommend Super Powereds by Drew Hayes, largely because of Kyle McCarley’s narration. They’ve been my “comfort books” for over 5 years, getting around 10 listens from me despite the series being ~179 hours. (I never listen at 1x speed, though.) He has a unique voice for every single character, which is frankly insane because there are ~65 recurring characters and over 150 total different speakers in the series. He makes it so easy to get into.

Also, there’s at least one mysterious moment where a character is not named. Thanks to the voice he does, audiobook listeners were able to conclusively determine which character that was.

Travis Baldree has also become a favorite narrator of mine. The Cradle series is great, and it just wouldn’t be the same without Travis’s performance.

I used to be bad at listening to audiobooks. ADHD brain would go way off for unknown amounts of time without realizing I wasn’t listening.

Then in 2017 I had eye surgery and decided audiobooks were the best form of media consumption, so I practiced focusing on them. Magic 2.0 was the series that clicked for me. Now I listen to dozens of audiobooks each year. I’ve finished 55 so far in 2024.

So yeah, Luke Daniels will forever be a favorite of mine! Though he only has a handful of truly unique voices so you’ll start hearing familiar characters in the wrong series sometimes, lol.

The waxed kind are not always PFAS! I use Reach Listerine Ultraclean and they specify no PFAS. It’s a waxy kind that slides easily!

When I first learned PFAS was a thing in floss, I figured it had to be in the stuff I use. Maybe it was at some point, but it’s not now.

Omg, I had no clue that existed. Thank you!

FFX

First time I played was at a boyfriend’s house. I got like 80% of the way through, then we broke up.

Second time, I let a friend borrow my GameCube in exchange for his PS2. I got about 80% of the way through, then he wanted his PS2 back.

I finally got my own PS2. Played about 80% of the way through but had a couple bad builds and couldn’t beat a boss. I didn’t have energy to grind my way into a better build, so I just never finished.

It’s been ~20 years. I still sometimes think I’ll break out the old PS2 and see if my save file is there. I probably won’t.

I love the “mind RAM” phrase, lol.

I was thinking of time and bandwidth as nearly synonymous, with mildly different connotations, but I think your definition of bandwidth is perfect and helps me realize what I subconsciously thought about it but hadn’t defined.

My industry/product are different enough from what you described to not have the same examples, but I realized when I talk about bandwidth (or more often, “capacity”), it’s most often when asking my direct reports if they’re able to take on new work. I realize that like you said, that means if they can work it to completion in whatever timeframe is allotted given their other priorities, and so stakeholders—myself included—see the progress. Given we’re on the Product side, the timescale could be anywhere from hours to a year depending on the topic/project. And typically I want to know because if they don’t think they have the capacity, then we can discuss priorities and what should drop, I can take the work on myself, or I can go back to my own stakeholders and set realistic expectations.

Thanks for taking the time to help me think about this!

I’m curious how they differ in your opinion. Can you elaborate?

For context, I’m a Product Manager and it wouldn’t occur to me that either takes more bandwidth. However, I do think “bandwidth” carries a connotation of priority. “I don’t have the time to work on that P1” would be a rather shocking statement to hear, since a P1 should, by definition, be the top priority. “I don’t have the bandwidth to work on that P1” says to me that there’s something equally or more important taking that person’s focus.