Let’s face it, the product manager job can be hard. There can be many competing priorities as well as key stakeholders that all believe their feature is the most important. As the product manager, you will have to say no to a lot of people. In addition, you still have to see the big picture, know you customer well, and understand what is most important. Working on a product that you believe in makes all the difference.
I would often think about the number of people my product would impact around the world. My purpose in life is to ‘add value’. Plain and simple as that. In addition to adding value to those around me, I believe I add value to the people that use the product that I am responsible for. Since my product ran across the entire eServer line as well as some storage, there was no reliable way to guess the average number of users per server but at 500 users on 300,000 servers it quickly adds up to 150,000,000 users. With that kind of impact, it was easy to be passionate about it.
If your not passionate about the product your managing, either get passionate or find another product. It’s makes all the difference in the world.