What makes a great product manager? Sophia Philippou on why the best PMs try to prove themselves wrong, and what 'strong opinions, loosely held' means.
Sophia Philippou, Perpetuate
I was speaking recently with an impressive VP Product who has just moved to Australia from the UK, and he said something that stuck with me:
"A great PM tries to prove themselves wrong."
It's such a simple way of describing good Product Management.
The job isn't to come up with an idea and then gather enough evidence to justify building it. It's to form a view, make the assumptions behind it explicit, and then actively look for the evidence that might prove those assumptions wrong.
What have we misunderstood about the customer?
What did we expect to happen that didn't?
What have we learned from everything we've tried?
What evidence would make us change our mind?
The strongest Product Managers I've worked with aren't overly attached to being right. They're attached to getting to the right answer.
"Strong opinions, loosely held" is a phrase that comes up frequently when businesses describe the Product Managers and Product leaders they want to hire.
And I think this quote gets to the heart of what that actually means.
Great Product people need to have a point of view, but that point of view shouldn't be based on conviction alone. It's informed by data, grounded in customer and market insight, and strong enough to make decisions, prioritise, challenge stakeholders and place bets.
But conviction can't become attachment.
The other half of the skill is being genuinely willing to discover that your hypothesis was wrong, your understanding of the customer was incomplete, or the opportunity wasn't as valuable as you thought.
That's an important distinction in Product.
Being decisive doesn't mean being certain.
And changing your mind when the evidence changes isn't weak Product judgement. It is Product judgement.
Perhaps that's the better test of "strong opinions, loosely held": not whether someone has strong opinions, but how actively they're willing to try to prove those opinions wrong.