Grit

Sometimes I think product management is just a long, slow black belt pursuit in disguise. Or like learning to play a complicated piece of music where you spend a ridiculous amount of time practicing three notes over and over, only to realize you’ve been playing them slightly wrong the whole time. Multi-year product work kind of feels like that. You're showing up every day, fixing little things, adjusting your stance, squinting at the roadmap wondering, when will this ever come together and make sense?

There’s grit in it. Quiet, persistent, sometimes boring grit. No one claps when you fix the fifth small bug of the week or rewrite the same JIRA story three times because the use case changed. But you keep going because you believe in the bigger picture. You're chasing a product vision the way a musician chases a melody they can almost hear, or a martial artist tries to land that one move that looked way easier on Insta.

Honestly, most of the time it feels like I'm alternating between hyper-focusing on one tiny detail ("should this dependency show here or...here?") and then zooming way out to explain to stakeholders how this is all part of a grand, cohesive experience we're building. It's a weird mental dance. Part player, part sensei, part cat herder in a goat rodeo.

But it works. You get there, sprint by sprint, bug by bug, quiet win by quiet win. And eventually, someone looks at what you’ve built and says, "How did you do that?" and THEN you have a whole new challenge to teach others where the hiking path is.