Last Saturday I grabbed some coffee with Jason Evanish (@evanish) a bright, dare i say wise, product manager from KISSmetrics (think of a supercharged version of google analytics giving you better information about user experience). Jason Shen, who is also a superstart but I have yet to meet, hooked the meeting up after learning about my interest in product management.

Some take aways from our conversation.

1. The vision I had of product management, and I don’t know exactly what influenced this vision, is not what it REALLY is. Will elaborate below.
2. San Francisco’s tech culture makes it easy to get almost anyone’s time. Apparently this comes from a tradition of mentoring. Everyone who has “made it” in the Bay at some point received advice at a time where they couldn’t offer anything back. Good news for me because I have little to offer anyone immediately. However I see these blogs entries as way to share something and hopeful someone take something away.
3. “If you want advice, ask for a job. If you want a job, ask for advice.” Jason adopted this from a saying in the startup community. It reasons if you want money from someone and ask them for it there likely to offer only advice, however when your agenda is ostensibly just advice they may actually surprise you with an investment.

Meeting Jason was useful to shatter my picture of what a product manager is. Going into the meeting I thought  PM functioned like a conductor of a ship. Ensuring the product stayed on the track, on time, and maintaining QC.

While this is a part of the product manager’s role this description leaves a lot of flesh on the bone. It also doesn’t acknowledge the vastly roles played by software product managers and those who manage physical ones (which maybe we could call hardware).

In the Bay Area most of the jobs for product managers center around developing and releasing web and software products.

In his book Inspired: How to Create Products Customer’s Love, Marty Cagan identifies the first role of the product manager as to, “discover a product that is valuable, usable, and feasible.”

After this phase the product manager clearly defines the product so the design and engineering teams can make it a reality. The PM takes a firm stance on what gets included into the immediate software build. Any ad hoc features, no matter how cool or useful, delay development and add unwanted complexity.

I don’t want to bore you with anything too technical here, I just wanted to briefly define the role of a product manager in the web and software world. Learning exactly what a product manager does in this role I was faced with a question.

Did I come to San Francisco to do this type of work?

“NO”

But now I know what I have to do.

I have to find another way to define the role I am pursuing out here in San Francisco because “product manager” or my favorite, “creative product manager” isn’t it. It probably only confuses those who I talk to in a position to help me because it is too vague, toofuzzy, too imprecise.

My next objective is to find someone who does product management for physical goods in the Bay and have a sit down with them to see how their role differs from PM in software. And lastly learn if this is the work I am after.

If you know any product managers for physical products in the Bay Area please have them contact me on twitter @oodlesofudo or email me at udoka@oodlesofudo.com.

If you have any other questions about my journey so far or any ideas you want me to explore in my next blog post please contact me about that too.