Welcome to the First day of the rest of your PM Life!
Hello and Welcome to the home of the Super PM. This blog is written as a guide and dedicated to all the PMs out there, both aspiring and experienced, to share knowledge and best practices and to help build a network of Super PM professionals that can together elevate the profession to the next level.
The term PM in today's times refers to several different titles that individuals hold in the high tech industry, starting from Product Manager to Program Manager, Project Manager, Product Delivery Manager, and even Portfolio Manager. This blog does not speak to job titles, instead, it goes out to all the people in the techno-functional domain, skilled at bridging the gaps between business and technology. The PM in this blog thus refers to any individual that's taking a problem in the business domain and building efficient and scalable solutions with the help of technology. To follow this blog, it doesn't really matter where you stand on the spectrum of the PM scale, and what your core responsibilities are, today, because if you keep on the path, eventually, you will go from performing business analysis and documenting feature specifications through to building wireframes, creating project plans, designing technical architecture, leading engineering teams and analyzing marketing data for competitive analysis, right up to contributing in pre-sales solutions, with product demonstrations, press releases, conferences, and webinars, when you're close to becoming a Super PM.
The breadth of responsibilities for people in these techno-functional roles is enormous and always keeps things interesting, because you may be a master at some of the things that are included as part of a PM role but it's nearly impossible to master all of the skills to an equal measure, and aiming for this is the fuel for growth, both for the individual and also for the organization. Over time, as a PM takes on more responsibilities and grows into a senior role, the organization can now derive better value from the same person who effectively becomes a mini-CEO with all of their different skills and viewpoints. This state when a person has had enough experience and expertise in all of the various aspects of the PM role is when I describe them becoming a Super PM. The definition of a Super PM is a regular PM plus an architect, a sales genius, a marketing guru, a finance whiz, and a true leader. There aren't very many Super PMs to be found, as it really takes a lot of hard work and a certain je ne sais quoi to become an expert in multiple domains spanning business and technology.
One may argue, with such a combination of skills, why still remain a PM? to them I say again, this blog does not speak to titles, rather the skills and expertise that's needed to transcend to the state of a Super PM. There may eventually be followers of this blog among both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, students, and professionals with a day job. The idea of a Super PM is to possess the skills necessary to build a product and your own company or maybe even a product in someone else's company. What makes the Super PM particularly difficult, is that it combines elements of technology and business artistically, so that it's not a formulaic approach where anyone spending a number of years in some relevant job titles may claim to be one. I myself fall a little way along on the spectrum of the Super PM, where I've experienced a bunch of different things and solved an assortment of different problems but I still need to gain more expertise in all of the domains to become a Super PM and this blog will document my journey and also provide direction to others who may want to take up this challenge. A utopian dream for this blog will be to create a universally acknowledged role called the "Super PM"
that companies hire for and maybe a page in Wikipedia with my name on it. 😊