Chapter 1

Balancing the Three Rings

Plummeting tail-first into cloud cover (where I shouldn’t have been) at the controls of a Bulldog T1 trainer aircraft, a few thousand feet above Royal Air Force Mildenhall’s military air traffic zone (where I definitely shouldn’t have been), I realized three things:

1. I’d failed miserably to execute a relatively straightforward maneuver called a stall turn.
2. I had to learn to prioritize the task at hand rather than allow my inner monologue to distract me.
3. I probably wasn’t cut out to be a pilot in the RAF.

While I’d love to proclaim, “And that’s when I knew I was born to be a product manager,” my route into the profession was more circuitous, as it is for almost all product managers. I had been planning to join the RAF when I finished my undergraduate studies, but that flawed stall turn told me I would have to switch to plan B. (Not a bad lesson for a future product manager, about which more later.) I’d never even heard of the role of product manager when I graduated, though.

You’re reading an extract from
The Practitioner’s Guide to Product Management
by Jock Busuttil