“Be stubborn on vision, flexible on details.” – Jeff Bezos, CEO and Founder of Amazon.
A clear vision is essential to knowing where we’re going. A lack of vision leads to chaos and directionless-ness. For Cyber PMMs, we are all too familiar with working on assignments that seem unrelated to a broader vision. Build this, write that, publish this, draft that. Day after day after day. When activities aren’t connected to a vision, we get stuck in “activity without accomplishment.”
Before doing anything, we should first ask, “what’s the end goal here?” Then we can reverse engineer a path from there. This is why I like the Bezos quote, because a vision really shouldn’t change often. Probably the best example of this is the goal to land on the moon in the 1960’s — the “moonshot.” Everyone knew the goal. There was no confusion. It didn’t change to “let’s land on Saturn”. And that vision kept people together. In the product world, it’s akin to building a wireframe for a product or website in Figma, before investing tons of resources into coding. Or having a recipe before cooking. Or having a manual to assemble something.
However, crafting a vision in isolation is a common mistake. It needs to be vetted and refined with input from others to ensure its feasibility and to avoid the tunnel vision of relying solely on one’s own “genius.” This is why the moonshot goal wasn’t, “let’s land on Saturn in 10 years.” This reminds me of my own painful failures in business.
After I graduated college I thought I had what it took to be an entrepreneur. When it came to vision, I was full of it (pun intended). I was in China and toured a building where painters were painting replicas of famous works by DaVinci, Van Gogh and others. I paid the painters to paint a replica of one of my family photos for a Christmas gift that year. I shipped it, everyone loved it, and an idea was born to do this as a business. I called it “OilShots”, and everything made complete sense — on paper. One of my first paying customers was memorable. I shipped the paintings to the customer without adequate quality control. The paintings I shipped didn’t meet customer expectations, and it started a painful support and refund process. I failed to set a realistic vision, so I became stranded without resources like a guy with an empty tank at a gas station without money. I imagine many other entrepreneurs know this feeling.
Speaking of entrepreneurs, a great place to learn about the balance between ambitious vision and practical execution is by listening to Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Elon Musk. His ventures with SpaceX and Tesla are prime examples of setting bold visions while grappling with the high costs of innovation. They also contain a lot of stories about learning from failure and moving on.
So, in the spirit of taking my own medicine, I’ve been thinking about the vision for Cyber PMMs. What is our destination? Will our profession even exist in 10 years? If so, what should it look like? What’s our moonshot? In the first series of posts, this is exactly what we’ll dive into. And as these ideas are shared, remember that your opinion will be used to revise and adapt what’s published. Please chime in!
Here’s the current structure of the Vision series:
- Part 1: Standardizing Cyber PMM Processes: Designing standard Cyber PMM processes, tools, and frameworks that cover a wide range of tasks we handle. Anyone that has worked in or knows about the SOAR market in cyber will understand why this is foundational. In order to implement workflow automation, you need to know how you operate, it’s that simple. And I really believe the future needs to have Cyber PMM process automation as a pillar for success. Which processes should we start with?
- Part 2: Unlocking the Potential of a Cyber PMM GPT Co-Pilot: Letting AI do what it excels at—being efficient, precise, and automating tasks—while we focus on what makes us uniquely human. We can’t ignore the fact that AI tools can accomplish Cyber PMM tasks with much better precision and faster that we can, so we should leverage it as a co-pilot providing assistance. This is about discussing actual improvements to scale and productivity, not hype. If in the end of our discussion we find no use for AI, fine, let’s toss away the concept. But I’m not ready to dismiss it yet.
- Part 3: Amplifying the Voice of the Customer: Transforming Cyber PMMs from “hermits” to realizing that we are the “voice of the customer.” It’s not just a role; it’s our superpower. We have to face the fact that our industry has collectively decided to ban PMMs from customer access. We have to win back a seat at the table and confront this challenge head on. In fact, this might need to be the first thing we do, or else everything else will be irrelevant. If we don’t know what is bringing value to our customer’s buyer journey, and our role in it, we’re toast.
- Part 4: The Quest for Measurable Success: Respect and validation hinges on our ability to provide concrete metrics that objectively demonstrate our value within our respective businesses. Nearly all other professions have some form of criteria for success, yet Cyber PMMs are still unsure of what our “scoreboard” is. There needs to be a vision for what we should measure, and what specific metrics make the most sense for Cyber PMMs specifically. And in doing this, we have to recognize our limitations across data access and cross-functional dependencies.
- Your ideas here: Please, chime in and add your views on what a vision should include.
Maybe a better way to describe this is as building a Cyber PMM roadmap. Cyber PMMs are constantly seeking accurate roadmaps from product managers because we need some sense of what the product will do and when it’ll be ready. Think about the last time you jumped in your car – I’m sure you had a destination in mind right? Without a vision, we’ll never know if we’ve reached our destination.
Stay tuned for future posts by subscribing to the newsletter on Substack or directly on the Cyber PMM website. You can also follow Cyber PMM or me on LinkedIn.
