I believe product management does not start from a "great idea", but from reducing guesswork
There is a situation I find very common when first learning about Product Management: someone comes up with a feature that sounds quite reasonable, the whole team gets excited about how to do it, and only after a few weeks do they realize that customers don't really need it, the sales team doesn't know who to sell it to, and the engineering team has wasted a considerable amount of effort. Previously, I used to think that product management was mainly about "coming up with new products" or "writing requirements for the development team". But as I learned more deeply, I realized that product management is much more expansive: it is how a company imagines, plans, develops, tests, launches, distributes, and ultimately withdraws the product from the market.
My perspective after this lesson is: good product management is not about making the product sound more enticing, but about reducing guesswork in costly, time-consuming decisions that affect customers. A Product Manager not only asks "what to do next?" but also has to ask "why do it?", "who really needs it?", "does this align with the company's strategy?", and "what stage is the product at in its lifecycle?".
