The 14 Most — And Least — Accurate Quotes about Product Management

There are SO. MANY. QUOTES. about Product Management. Just Google “Product Management Quotes” and you’ll be bombarded by pages and pages of pithy one-liners that will make you a better PM (or so you hope!).

Believe it or not, I’m actually a fan of a vast majority of these quotes.

Not because they provide some sort of mystical wisdom that is impossible to discover in any other way, but rather because they are often 100% accurate. It’s for this reason that I’ve used quotes from other Product Managers in both of my books and why I continue to use them in many of my blog posts.

But…every so often, I come across a Product Management quote that somehow became popular but is neither pithy nor accurate, neither helpful nor insightful. In fact, sometimes I see quotes about Product Management that are downright wrong and damaging.

So let’s separate the highly accurate product quotes from the BS (or just super confusing) ones.

Highly Accurate Quotes About Product

Here are a few quotes I’ve found to be highly accurate in my time in Product across four different tech companies.

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

– Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn/Greylock

Commentary from Alex: There’s a reason I put this one first. It’s pretty easy to say, but oh-so-hard to do. You’ll be getting pressure from almost everyone to wait to release (“we need to wait for x feature”) and you’ll often face some tough feedback from the market/customers on your release (“it’s missing y”), but if you’ve built a true MVP, you’ll be able to validate or invalidate your hypothesis and move onward and upward faster.