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Letter to a New Product Manager: A Brian Armstrong’s Guide 🧠
Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, offers guidance to a new product manager in an adapted email from June 2025, published in The Founders’ Tribune. This letter emphasizes the dedication required to master product management, likening it to people management in its complexity and need for hands-on experience.
Armstrong outlines key responsibilities such as deeply understanding the customer, being metrics-driven, prioritizing the product roadmap through consensus building, and acting as a central communication hub. The author also touches upon the ultimate goal of creating customer delight and provides practical tasks for the role, while distinguishing it from an engineering manager’s duties.
Here’s an excerpt of his essay: Letter To A New Product Manager by Brian Armstrong.
The main parts of the job in my view are:
Understand the customer deeply – this means user studies, you have to go talk to the users every week and spend a lot of time with them to hear their pain, get inside their head.
Be metrics driven, you should be using time series data to give you insight into what people are doing with the product and see if the changes you are making are improving things. If you haven’t instrumented the app and chosen a metric you want to improve, you are just guessing.
The product manager is responsible for prioritizing the product roadmap and communicating it to the team. Not as a top down dictator, but as a consensus builder amongst all the stakeholders, breaking a tie when necessary.
You need to be a communication hub, both when building consensus internally on priorities/roadmap, but also externally communicating changes to customers. Users need to see that the product is continually improving by hearing about it from you. Everyone internally needs to be on the same page when changes roll out. You are the point of contact for all things related to this product.
Once you master all of that, you will need to develop product vision (conviction about where things are going in the future, make the hard calls about what to eliminate, etc) and strive to make something truly great. You can think about it not just as eliminating customer pain, but actually creating customer delight. In rare instances, you can wind up creating something that people actually love. (very few products attain this – nobody says they love Tide detergent, but people do say they love their Harley Davidson).
On a practical note, you are responsible for the following tasks on the team: running product review, maintaining/updating the product roadmap, and doing sprint planning.
Read his blog HERE:
https://www.founderstribune.org/p/letter-to-a-new-product-manager-by-brian-armstrong
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