As an aside, asking for operating advice from VCs is generally dumb anyway. They’re VCs, not operators. If you want advice on what your company has to look like to be considered valuable, ask the VCs. If you want advice on how to actually do that, you will get plenty of advice that probably has very little applicability. Many VCs were operators once, of course, but the half-life of that knowledge is shorter than you thin

Do not surprise your board members. This sounds obvious, but founders do it all the time. You probably have too. If you use the board meeting as a time to convey new and important information then you are surprising your board.

Boards firing the CEO happens quite often, especially as a company gets larger and more valuable. As Feld and Ramsinghani point out, “by the time the ventures were three years old, 50% of the founders were no longer the CEO.” (p. 145.) Some firms, like Sequoia Capital, even trumpet their propensity to fire CEOs. The fact that early-stage founders continue to take their money has to be some sort of delusional grandiosity, in my humble opinion. “Well yes, they fire half the CEOs they back, but surely not me.”

The VCs are not on your board so they can help you, they can help you without being on the board. They are on your board for one reason: to monitor their investment so they can do something if things aren’t going how they want. Founders have many reasons they start companies, but investors really have only one reason they back them: to make money.

Maersk reports being responsible for 20% of global shipping capacity.  Roughly translated, that means a Maersk ship is entering a port somewhere in the world every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

I then concentrated on my top 30. I scheduled those ranking 15 through 30 first, hoping to perfect my pitch before putting those ranked 1 through 15 for the second half of my first two-week pitch window. This ensured I pitched my top targets after I had iterated on the deck several times and felt confident in the way I was telling my story.

Similarly, we use an opportunity algorithm to quantify which of the customer’s desired outcomes are unmet, and to what degree. A desired outcome statement is a uniquely defined need statement that describes how customers measure success when getting a job done. We assign a number to a desired outcome that indicates whether products or services used in a given market adequately or inadequately serve it.

This last characteristic may be the easiest to evaluate. Unless the position is very junior, I’ll usually hire product managers who’ve actually shipped a product. I mean from start to finish, concept to launch. Nothing is a better indication of someone’s ability to ship great products than having done it before. Past performance is an indication of future success

I always insist that at a minimum, representatives from engineering, design, and marketing meet a potential PM candidate.

I often joke that much of the time your job is to be the advocate for whoever isn’t currently in the room - the customer, engineering, sales, executives, marketing. That means you need to be capable of doing other people’s jobs, but smart enough to know not to. Great PMs know how to channel different points-of-view. They play devil’s advocate a lot. They tend to be unsatisfied with simple answers.

So what do I look for in a PM? Most importantly, raw intellectual horsepower. I’ll take a wickedly smart, inexperienced PM over one of average intellect and years of experience any day. Product management is fundamentally about thinking on your feet, staying one step ahead of your competitors, and being able to project yourself into the minds of your colleagues and your customers.

2. Develop specific superpowers — don’t just rely on being a smart generalist.

Whatever the future intentions of the PM, one thing remains for certain: this position is at the intersection from where founder strategy, user feedback, development team management, and market awareness come together. From what’s been said, it certainly appears that this is not a role that you “fall” into, but rather could aspire to be in.

What’s more, to be a good PM, individuals also need to understand that it’s all about the bigger picture. Great managers “win” games, meaning that it’s not about getting a product out the door, but by ensuring that over the long-term, the team helps solve a larger problem. Nash says it’s not about getting an “E for effort” and brush off things that don’t work.

The product manager isn’t the one that’s just sitting around overseeing the various teams and seeing whether it’s on track to meet the scheduled delivery or launch date. They are the ones who need to understand the market and that means knowing who the competitors are, what consumers want, and being able to help the marketing and sales teams better target them.

More tactically,helping your team often means being the person who writes and summarizes notes after a long meeting, or writing a spec to make sure you have captured the team’s consensus and plan in written form.

A lot of people describe a product manager as a CEO of the product or the “owner” of the spec, but I think that over-ascribes influence and authority to the product manager. The best teams operate in a way where the team collectively feels ownership over the spec and everyone has had input and been able to suggest and promote ideas. The best product managers coordinate the key decisions by getting input from all team members and are responsible to surface disagreements, occasionally break ties, and gather consensus (or at least ensure that everyone commits to a plan) when decisions get made.

Great product managers understand the very tricky balance between getting it right and getting it out the door.

While shipping matters, the best product managers help the team make sure it’s the right product. Building something that doesn’t exist yet is always fun, but never a slam dunk.

More importantly, once shipped, the best product managers can measure whether the product shipped is the right one. They should work closely with the team to make sure the right moments in the product are measurable, and that the hard questions about whether people are really using the product can be answered.

Great product managers listen to user feedback all the time — whether it’s from usability tests, meeting users in the field, reading support emails or tweets, or working with the people in your company who do all of those things on a daily basis.