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Product Management Superpower: Poker Face

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Thoughts and essays from a career in Product Management. Over the last twenty-odd years, I have gathered experience across a wide range of technology companies, and will publish my experiences here, to share the wealth.
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Product Management Superpower: Poker Face

Since I am on a roll lately, one additional superpower is to have the ability to remain emotion free when someone says something completely insane in your presence. This is boss-level coping

Geoff Anderson
Oct 21, 2022
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Product Management Superpower: Poker Face

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woman in black turtleneck top
Photo by Andrey Zvyagintsev on Unsplash

I saw a tweet a while back that asked for the various faces Product Managers make:

Twitter avatar for @eeselapp
eesel @eeselapp
What are the different faces product managers make? GIF replies only 👇
2:55 PM ∙ Oct 19, 2022
2Likes1Retweet

And that got me thinking. My response was:

Twitter avatar for @ganders2112
Geoffrey Anderson @ganders2112
@eeselapp
Steve Carell Bitch Face GIF
6:52 PM ∙ Oct 19, 2022

the classic. I was trying to convey a “Resting Bitch Face” vibe, but in the end, it really isn’t, as RBF is showing an attitude, and what is called for is stony, and a poker face.

The formal definition:

Clearly, this is a huge product manager strength. You will often find yourself in a meeting with a stakeholder and they will advocate for something that is just batshit insane. A feature that is ludicrous, or a capability that literally nobody (and you have reams of data from customer surveys and discussions backs up) wants, just because they know that it will make your product epic.

You keep your poker face, you commit to adding it to the (bottom of the) backlog knowing that it will never surface above the cut line.

Sure, you can do things like tell them that you will have to weigh it against your top features, and convince them that you are taking it seriously, when in fact you really want to bust out in guffaws about how stupid their idea is.

If you don’t have or develop a good poker face, you will likely have trouble longer term as a product manager.

Coda

My original thought around the RBF was the epic RBF that Cara Delavigne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. While I am exercising my poker face, I have the vision of her in my mind.


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