I’m a product manager, amongst other sins, for a telco on London’s “Silicon Roundabout”, and sometimes when one is wrestling a product out the door (you can see the finger-nail marks around the door-frame, as it resists your attempts to release it), one wonders about product management.

Product Management (PdM) is about choosing where to compromise and where not to.  Steve Job’s biography by Isaacson never seemed to get quite to the heart of it (from my POV), and maybe no one ever will.  But Steve is a useful ghost to have around.

Bill Gates shall be my Ghost of Product Managers Past: the techie driven federation of features all jumbled in together.

Steve Jobs, then, is the Ghost of Product Managers Present, the highly curated Appie approach.  Here the user story is king, and everything looks very minimalistic. The problem is that you can spend hours looking for something important, as clear signalling is not as important as a “cool” appearance.

And who is the Ghost of Product Managers to come? Bill is retired and spending his billions on good causes, Steve is dead… so who comes next? Both Microsoft and Apple are ever evolving, but Google could be a strong contender with its Android OS. Who’s your Ghost of Product Managers Future?

Later this week, I’ll reveal how the Ghosts helped me to design one of the most technologically advanced pieces (in my humble and not at all biased opinion) of telecoms equipment on the market.