1 I’ve sometimes felt that being a CEO is a lot like being a PM, except the product is your company. Maybe if I’d started out in engineering or sales or marketing, I’d think that being a CEO was like those things. But I was a PM.

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2 There are a few PM 101 things that I’ve come to remember recently.

This whole thread might be another way to say, “Build on your strengths; use those to power your career growth.” We often talk about growth as unlearning one set of habits and practices while learning others.

3 But I’ve come to think that it’s rarely wise to abandon your core strengths. I’m reflecting on this a lot recently because I’ve recently rediscovered a set of 3 PM skills that I had unwillingly let atrophy in this role, and it’s helping me to lean into them.

4 The first one is so obvious, and something every entry-level PM learns from their very first spec review: If something is important, then writing it down and meeting about it are BOTH important.

5 I am a writer by nature. When I write something so that it is clear to me, that means it is clear to everyone reading it, and they all agree, right?

6 Sadly, that is not right. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time in my career assuming that once it is written, it is clear and everyone is aligned.

Every single time I’ve assumed this, I’ve been wrong. I have made this mistake a lot of times.

7 The thing that helps is pulling people together for an hour to discuss, share perspectives, ask questions, and actually do the social work of aligning. Which is related to, but not the same as, the intellectual work of writing it in the first place.

8 For a word obsessive and a mostly-introvert like me, it’s easy to assume that writing it down is enough. It is never enough.

For an extrovert who forms a pov by talking, it’s probably easy to assume that meeting is enough. That is never enough either.

9 Write it down, meet about it, revise the writing.

Or meet about it, write it down, and then meet again.

Whichever order you go in, you need both writing and meeting to get a plan to stick and have buy-in. A good PM knows this.

10 The second core PM thing that matters in this job, also obvious in retrospect, is stating top priorities clearly, without ambiguity.

11 In a given system, there are many important things going on at any given time. But they can’t all be most important, because if they are, none of them can succeed. A system needs clear priorities to drive practical decisions in a principled way.

12 A good PM is able to state the top priority clearly, so that everyone else on the team can confidently make the right decisions and tradeoffs without always having to check in.

Good team managers, good executives, and good CEOs all need to do this too.

13 If you don’t state priorities clearly, or worse, if you’re not clear on priorities yourself, then you can expect that the set of individual decisions that people make won’t coalesce into something valuable.

They probably won’t even coalesce into something coherent.

14 If this happens, it isn’t the system’s fault, or the people in the system's fault. It’s the PM’s (or leaders) fault, for not having been principled and clear!

15 Decide the priorities. State the priorities. Write the priorities down. Meet to discuss the priorities.

16 If you’re doing it right, you’re writing and saying and meeting about a lot of the same things over and over again. It can feel redundant and repetitive.

But if you want it to happen and you’re not weary of saying it, you’re probably not saying it enough.

17 The third core PM thing that I have come back to recently: If you don’t set a clear schedule, then you don’t get to b disappointed when things happen on different timelines than you expect.

18 By “set a clear schedule,” I mean state the priorities that drive the schedule, write the priorities, meet to review the priorities, write the schedule down, publish it, meet to review it.

Basically the first two core lessons come to roost with this one too.

19 Over and over again, PM 101 (for PMs, project leaders, managers, executives, or CEOs) comes back to: Write it, meet about it, revise it, repeat it, start over.

Who even knew?

(Every good PM 2 years into their career knew.)