Great Product Managers break out of the echo chamber

It’s common to see LinkedIn posts listing popular Product Management books and articles as an “alternative MBA for Product Managers”—and I’m sure similar lists exist for other business functions too. The idea sounds great in theory, but here’s the issue: if we believe that growing as Product Managers means simply consuming more PM-specific content, we’re trapping ourselves in an overly narrow perspective.

The real breakthrough as a Product Manager comes from stepping outside our echo chamber and diving into the very fields that make Product Management. The best PMs I’ve ever met aren’t just regurgitating PM principles. They’re not just fluent in the Product dialect, they’re true polyglots of strategy, operations, economics, systems thinking, design thinking, behavioural psychology, anthropology, and many more. They take concepts from different sources, and piece them together to make success and growth inevitable.