Forget about promotion.

Forget about politics, org charts, titles, and who gets invited to which meeting.

Imagine waking up every day with one simple question in your head:

“What is the biggest impact I can have today?”

Now imagine leading a team where that question quietly shapes every roadmap conversation, every trade-off, every “no,” every launch.

That’s the core operating system behind many of the best product leaders of our time—people who have built things like Amazon Smile, scaled Alexa around the world, shaped Airbnb’s support platform, and are now steering electrification and autonomy at companies like Uber.

We romanticize the idea of the “top 1% product manager.” We turn it into a personality type, a LinkedIn aesthetic, or a checklist of “must-have” skills. But underneath the mythology, the pattern is surprisingly simple:

Top PMs obsess over impact, and then they build skills that make that obsession real.

This editorial is about those skills, but more importantly, about the mental models behind them—how top PMs think, not just what they do.

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1. The Myth of the “Top 1% PM”

In product circles, “top 1% PM” has become a meme.

It started as a practical answer to a Quora question: What separates a top 1% product manager from a top 10% one? The answer turned into a legendary post, quoted in interviews, forwarded in Slack, turned into slide decks and career ladders.

But here’s the part most people miss:

Even the person who wrote that post will tell you this:

There is no PM who is literally top 1% at everything.

The mythical PM who:

• thinks big like a founder,
• writes like a novelist,
• prioritizes like a ruthless operator,
• understands technical trade-offs like a staff engineer,
• designs like a product designer,
• and still has boundless empathy, energy, and time…

…does not exist.

What does exist are product leaders who have learned which skills really matter, at which stage, and for which kind of impact.

That’s the first mindset shift:

You don’t have to be world-class at everything. You do have to be deliberate about what you get world-class at.

And the throughline across careers that span Amazon, Microsoft, Airbnb, Uber, and beyond is surprisingly consistent: impact-first thinking, supported by a handful of hard-earned skills.

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2. Impact Over Promotion: The Guiding Light

There’s a moment that reveals a PM’s operating system.

It’s not their roadmap deck.
Not their promotion packet.
Not how many people they manage.

It’s this question:

What actually drives your day?

Is it:

• “What will look good in my promo packet?”
• “How do I stay visible to senior leadership?”
• “How do I grow my headcount?”

Or is it something quieter and more dangerous:

“How do I create the most leverage and impact for this business and these customers with the resources I have right now?”

Veteran product leaders will tell you: the second mindset is the one that compounds.

Early in his career, one Amazon PM described being almost obsessively focused on a single thing: the metric that defined success for his business. Not just hitting a target, but pushing that metric as far and as fast as possible “up and to the right.”

He didn’t spend his one-on-ones angling for promotion.
He didn’t design projects to look impressive on performance reviews.
He chased impact.

The result? Promotions came anyway.

Not because he was optimizing for them, but because impact is the most reliable leading indicator of advancement in any healthy product organization.

This isn’t naïve idealism. It’s a strategy.

If you optimize for promotion, you’re incentivized to:

• choose visible projects over hard ones,
• inflate scope instead of simplifying,
• avoid risk where failure is public and messy,
• hoard credit and minimize blame.

If you optimize for impact, you’re incentivized to:

• seek the largest, hairiest problems,
• simplify relentlessly,
• fight for the right metrics,
• build trust by repeatedly doing what you said you would do,
• share context and credit so more people can help you win.

The irony is delicious:

The PM who cares less about promotion often gets promoted faster.

Impact is the guiding light. But to make it real, you need skills. And for new PMs, three skills matter more than all the others.

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3. For New PMs: The Unsexy Trinity — Communicate, Prioritize, Execute

If you’re early in your PM career, the world can feel overwhelming.

Should you learn SQL?
Should you read Inspired again?
Should you binge design systems?
Should you study system design?
Should you be more “strategic”?

All useful. None foundational.

Ask anyone who has managed dozens or hundreds of PMs, and they’ll give you a brutally simple answer:

If you’re new, focus obsessively on three things:

1. Communicate
2. Prioritize
3. Execute

Everything else is built on top.

3.1 Communicate: Answer First, Then Explain

A surprising number of otherwise smart PMs fail this very basic test:

Someone asks:
“When is this going to ship?”

They answer:
“Well, we’re waiting for this other team, and the design changed, and the API is more complex than we thought, and the dependency…”

What they don’t say is the only thing the other person actually needs:

“We’re tracking for March 18. Here’s the risk and what we’re doing about it.”

Communication, at its core, is answering the actual question clearly, then providing the necessary context.

Top PMs ruthlessly avoid:

• rambling,
• hedging,
• hiding the answer in a story,
• drowning people in caveats before they hear the headline.

They default to:

• Answer → Explain (not the other way around),
• using numbers when possible,
• being explicit about risk and uncertainty,
• writing as if the listener has limited time and unlimited alternatives.

One Amazon leader liked to remind PMs:

“Avoid weasel words. Answer first. Own your problems.”

You can start sharpening this today:

• After every important meeting or email, ask yourself:
  • “Did I answer the actual question?”
  • “Could I have answered that in half the words?”
• Occasionally ask your manager:
  • “In that last meeting, how could I have communicated better?”

Great PMs are not born great communicators. They iterate their communication the way they iterate product.

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3.2 Prioritize: The Invisible 5x Multiplier

Given the same resources, the same engineers, the same designer, the same time…

…one PM will generate 5x the impact of another.

Not because they’re smarter. Not because they work longer hours. But because they prioritize better.

Prioritization is not just “what goes at the top of the roadmap.”

It shows up in dozens of subtle ways:

• Which themes you choose to invest in.
• How deeply you go on a given feature.
• When you cut scope versus push the date.
• Which customer segment you optimize for first.
• How you allocate your own time between strategy, execution, stakeholder management, and personal development.

Top PMs use prioritization like a pressure valve. They:

• starve low-impact work of attention,
• aggressively prune “nice to haves,”
• resist the lure of “cool tech” that doesn’t move the metric,
• make hard trade-offs transparent and explicit.

One Amazon PM described his early success simply:

“It wasn’t that I was smarter, or more technical, or working more hours. I was just hungrier for impact and more ruthless about focusing the team on the few projects that would truly move the metric.”

If you want to grow fast as a PM, treat prioritization as a craft, not a meeting:

• Define 1–2 fitness functions (metrics that define success).
• Ask constantly: “What is the highest-leverage thing we can do next to move this?”
• Say “no” or “not now” more often than you’re comfortable with.

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3.3 Execute: The Motive Power of the Team

The third pillar is blunt and unforgiving:

Can you actually ship?

Execution is not glamorous, but it is where reputations are made or broken.

As a PM, you are not writing the code or pushing to prod. But you are the motive power behind the work:

• You clarify scope when chaos creeps in.
• You force decisions when bikeshedding takes over.
• You de-risk dependencies before they explode.
• You keep the team emotionally aligned with the “why,” especially when deadlines tighten.

Execution is also intimately tied to how well your team operates, not just how well you personally perform.

Top PMs ask:

• Are we learning and improving every sprint?
• Are we clear on what “done” means?
• Are we designing the smallest shippable thing that still delivers real value?
• Are we honest about our risks—and our progress?

Think of execution as keeping your promises to the organization and to your users.

When you repeatedly:

• say you’ll ship,
• actually ship,
• ship what you said you’d ship,

…you quietly build a reputation that compounds into trust.

And trust, as we’ll see next, is the currency of senior product leadership.

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4. For Senior PMs: Think Big, Earn Trust, Drive Impact

As you grow in your career, the expectations change.

Early on, you’re judged by:

• clarity,
• follow-through,
• craftsmanship on a defined surface area.

Later, you’re judged by harder, fuzzier questions:

• “Is this person thinking big enough?”
• “Do I trust them with more resources?”
• “Are they creating outsized impact relative to their scope?”

Three skills suddenly become decisive.

4.1 Think Big: Expand the Box

Most PMs operate inside a box:

• “My product is this feature area.”
• “My job is to write specs and manage the backlog.”
• “Marketing, operations, and finance are someone else’s problem.”

Top PMs quietly break that box.

They don’t just ask:

• “What should we build?”

They ask:

• “What is the full path to success for this product?”
• “What are all the levers—product, marketing, ops, business model, support—that impact this outcome?”
• “What would this look like at 10x scale?”

They think like owners, not renters.

That doesn’t mean barging into the CFO’s office with half-baked ideas. It means being willing to own the whole problem until you can find the right partners to share it with.

A helpful trick:

Before locking into a solution, ask:

“If this idea worked far better than we expect, what would it look like?”

Start from that bigger vision. You can still ship small. But you’re now moving toward something truly meaningful.

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4.2 Earn Trust: The Hidden Currency of Product Leaders

There’s a quiet turning point in many PM careers.

You go from:

• “Can you own this feature?”
  to
• “Can we trust you with this business?”

At that point, your ability to earn and keep trust becomes the bottleneck.

Trust is not vibes.
It’s not charisma.
It’s not “being nice.”

Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations.

Leaders trust PMs who:

• tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable,
• give the same answer to different people (no triangulation),
• launch when they say they will,
• escalate early when things go off the rails,
• own their mistakes and learn from them,
• call their shots (forecasts, goals) and then actually hit them more often than not.

One senior leader put it this way:

“If I give you more resources, do I believe you’ll turn them into disproportionate impact? That belief is trust.”

As you grow, you’ll need to:

• persuade other teams to take on work that doesn’t “belong” to them,
• make trade-offs between short-term pain and long-term gain,
• push back on executives without being insubordinate,
• rally people around changes they didn’t ask for.

None of that is possible without trust.

If you’re mid-career, this is worth reflecting on brutally:

• Do people feel safer or more anxious when you own something?
• When you commit to a date or an outcome, do folks quietly discount it?
• Do you follow up on your own decisions, or do you disappear after alignment is “achieved”?

Trust is not about being perfect. It’s about being predictable, honest, and accountable. Over and over again.

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4.3 Drive Impact: Your Real Performance Review

For senior PMs, impact stops being a nice story and becomes the whole point.

Take two people:

• Person A: thoughtful, collaborative, great communicator—low impact.
• Person B: equally thoughtful and collaborative—but with a track record of significantly moving metrics that matter.

Which one do you bet on? Promote? Give the gnarly new problem to?

In a healthy organization, it’s Person B.

That’s harsh, but it’s reality.

For senior PMs, being “good” is table stakes:

• everyone can write a decent doc,
• everyone can speak in meetings,
• everyone can run an A/B test.

What actually differentiates is:

“In the last 12–24 months, what did you materially improve for this company or our customers?”

If you’re senior and stagnating, the answer is almost never:

• “I need a more impressive title,” or
• “I need a bigger team.”

The answer is usually:

• “I need to aim at bigger, more consequential problems,” and
• “I need to prioritize and execute in a way that produces unmistakable results.”

The same guiding light from earlier still applies:

Forget about promotion. Wake up every day and ask,
‘How do I maximize my impact today?’

But now your canvas is bigger—and so are the stakes.

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5. Working Backwards: The Craft of Starting at the Problem

Amazon popularized a phrase that now shows up in countless pitch decks and internal docs:

“Working backwards.”

It sounds simple: start with the customer, then work backwards to the solution.

In practice, most teams get this wrong.

They say they’re working backwards, but here’s what they actually do:

• get excited about a technology,
• combine a few “ingredients” that already exist (“We have this ML model and this data source… we could…”),
• storyboard something cool,
• then bolt on a “problem statement” after the fact.

That’s not working backwards.

That’s solution-hunting disguised as customer obsession.

5.1 The Real Heart of Working Backwards

Real working backwards is uncomfortable because it starts with this brutally simple step:

1. Write down the problem in plain language.
   • Which customer?
   • What are they trying to do?
   • What’s hard, painful, or impossible today?
   • How do you know?
2. Only then explore solutions.

At Amazon, one popular mechanism for forcing this discipline was the internal press release.

The structure was roughly:

• Problem paragraph: what’s broken for customers today.
• Solution paragraph: what exists now that didn’t before.
• Customer quote: why this matters in their words.
• Then the FAQ: the “fact” that shows there’s a legitimate plan to succeed.

The trick wasn’t the format.

The trick was that leaders refused to engage deeply until the problem was clearly articulated.

One PM recounted bringing a concept to review without a proper problem paragraph. The feedback was surgical:

“If you don’t have a problem paragraph, maybe there isn’t a real problem.”

That’s working backwards. It’s a discipline, not a template.

5.2 How to Tell If You’re Faking It

Think about the last time you pitched a new idea.

Did you start with:

• “We could do X with LLMs…”
• “What if we used feature flags to…”
• “What if we combine this API with that service…”

Or did you start with:

• “Our merchants in tier-2 cities are churning at 3x the rate because onboarding is confusing and slow. Here’s why.”

A simple test:

If you removed your solution from the document, would the problem statement still stand as something painful and important on its own?

If not, you’re probably retrofitting the problem to justify the solution.

Working backwards is not about writing a press release. It’s about retraining your brain to refuse to move forward until the problem is undeniably worth solving.

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6. The Operator’s Mindset: Learning From Your Own Product

Another underappreciated lesson from Amazon is the operator’s mindset.

We celebrate product managers for the things they launch.

We rarely celebrate them for the things they run exceptionally well.

Yet some of the most powerful product insights come not from ideation workshops but from weekly, ruthless reviews of the product you already have.

At Amazon, senior leaders would sit through regular business reviews where each team owner had to:

• show key metrics,
• explain variances,
• describe what they were doing about them.

The hidden effect of this ritual:

• PMs learned to know their business cold.
• They built the muscle of connecting data → diagnosis → decision.
• They internalized that a product is not “done” at launch; it’s an organism that needs constant care.

This mindset is portable.

You don’t have to work at Amazon to adopt it.

You can:

• Run a weekly metrics review with your team, even if it’s just three people.
• Force yourself to have a clear narrative for:
  • what moved,
  • why it moved,
  • what you’re doing about it next.
• Treat every surprising metric movement as a gift—raw input for the next iteration.

Think of it this way:

Working backwards helps you build the right thing.
Operating rigorously helps you keep it right—and make it better.

You need both.

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7. The Unexpected Career Superpower: Writing in Public

There’s one more thread that quietly shapes many product careers:

Writing on the internet.

The original “top 1% PM” post was not written as a branding exercise.
It started as a simple attempt to:

• answer a well-posed question,
• clarify the author’s own thinking,
• share what had been learned the hard way.

The consequences were far bigger than expected:

• doors opened at companies like Airbnb,
• founders and leaders reached out,
• a network of product peers formed long before formal interviews.

All from one answer. Then a few more. Then a newsletter.

That’s the quiet magic of putting your thinking into words and publishing it:

• you crystallize your own mental models,
• you discover what resonates beyond your own bubble,
• you attract people who think about the world in similar ways.

You don’t need a huge platform to start.

You can:

• write a breakdown of how your team actually applied working backwards,
• share your “operator’s manual” for how you like to work,
• document a hard lesson from a failed launch.

Remember that possibly apocryphal line:

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”

In product management, that’s less a quote and more a survival strategy.

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8. Monday Morning: How to Actually Use This

Reading about top 1% PMs is fun.

Becoming even a top 10% PM is about repetition, not inspiration.

Here’s a practical way to bring this editorial down to earth.

8.1 Pick One Skill Per Quarter

Instead of trying to “become a 1% PM” all at once, pick one skill per quarter to deliberately improve:

1. Q1: Communicate
   • Practice “answer first, then explain.”
   • Rewrite your next 3 important emails to be 50% shorter.
   • After 1:1s or reviews, jot down: “How could I have communicated that more clearly?”
2. Q2: Prioritize
   • Define 1–2 core metrics that truly matter.
   • For every backlog item, ask: “What is the expected impact on those metrics?”
   • Say “no” or “not now” at least once per sprint.
3. Q3: Execute
   • For one important project, write down your commitments:
     • date, scope, expected outcome.
   • Share them with stakeholders.
   • Track progress publicly. Adjust transparently.
4. Q4: Earn Trust
   • Audit your commitments from the past month.
   • Where did you slip? Did you proactively own it?
   • Pick one behavior that would increase trust (e.g., earlier risk escalation) and practice it.

8.2 Work Backwards on One Real Problem

Choose a real problem you’re facing:

• high churn segment,
• broken onboarding step,
• unreliable internal tool,
• slow support response times.

Then:

1. Write a problem paragraph in plain language.
2. Share it with your team and ask:
   • “Do we agree this is the problem worth solving?”
3. Only after that, brainstorm solutions.

If your solution idea changes as you clarify the problem, good. That’s working backwards.

8.3 Adopt an Operator Ritual

Start a lightweight weekly review:

• 30 minutes.
• Your team only.
• No slides.
• Just the key metrics and a simple narrative:
  • What moved?
  • Why?
  • What are we doing next?

Keep it going for 8 weeks. You’ll be amazed at how quickly people start thinking like owners.

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9. The Quiet Truth About Top 1% PMs

In the end, the “top 1% PM” is not a LinkedIn archetype.

It’s the person who:

• wakes up thinking about impact, not optics,
• communicates clearly under pressure,
• prioritizes ruthlessly,
• executes reliably,
• thinks bigger than their formal scope,
• earns trust by doing what they say they’ll do,
• starts from the problem, not the tech,
• and never stops refining their own operating system.

You don’t become that person by chasing a title, or a level, or a viral post.

You become that person one decision at a time:

• When you choose to answer the question directly,
• When you kill a beloved feature because the data is clear,
• when you admit a mistake before anyone forces you to,
• When you write down the problem, even though you’re itching to jump to the solution,
• when you quietly pick the harder, higher-impact path over the easy, visible one.

Forget everything else for a moment.

Tomorrow morning, when you open your laptop, ask yourself:

“What is the single most impactful thing I can move forward today—for my customers, my team, and this business?”

Then communicate clearly. Prioritize ruthlessly. Execute relentlessly.

Do that for a few years.

People might start calling you a “top 1% PM.”

You’ll know you just woke up every day trying to have the biggest impact you could.

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The Invisible Skills That Make a Top 1% Product Manager — Lessons From Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber

“Forget about promotion. Forget about politics. Wake up every single day trying to have the biggest impact you can.”
— Ian McAllister

In product management, people love frameworks, roadmaps, templates, and toolkits. They buy books with brightly colored Venn diagrams promising the perfect overlap between design, engineering, and business. But anyone who has actually done the job knows the truth:

Product management is closer to a craft than a formula.
It’s a long game of shaping ambiguous problems, aligning humans, thinking with precision, and quietly driving impact when no one is watching.

That’s why conversations with builders like Ian McAllister—former Amazon Director, early Airbnb PM, now leading global product for Uber’s vehicles platform—are unusually clarifying. His career has spanned Amazon Smile, Alexa’s international expansion, and the systems that will power Uber’s electric and autonomous fleets.

But more importantly?

He understands something most people miss:

Top 1% product managers aren’t better because they work harder. They’re better because they think differently.

This piece is not a recap of a single conversation.
It’s a deep editorial about the ideas behind the ideas — the principles that separate world-class PMs from everyone else, drawn from McAllister’s years inside some of the most demanding product cultures on earth.

If you are a PM (or want to become one), this is the kind of essay you bookmark, print, and revisit every few months.

Let’s begin.

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1. The Myth of the Superhuman PM

There’s a popular fantasy in tech that the best product managers are superhuman:

• brilliant strategists
• flawless communicators
• natural storytellers
• deeply technical
• beloved by engineers
• visionary thinkers
• data scientists on the side
• conflict-resistant
• always calm
• always right

This fantasy is seductive — but harmful.

Because the truth is the opposite.

Top 1% PMs aren’t superhuman. They’re just relentlessly excellent at a small number of foundational skills.

Meanwhile, average PMs spread themselves thin trying to be good at everything, which means they become excellent at nothing.

What are these foundational skills?
McAllister’s original post (now legendary in PM circles) listed many. But the heart of the matter — the three skills every new PM needs — are simple:

1. Communicate clearly

2. Prioritize ruthlessly

3. Execute reliably

Not shiny.
Not glamorous.
Not “thought leadership.”
Just discipline.

These three skills, when practiced consistently, create compounding leverage. They become the quiet engine of a PM’s reputation.

Let’s break them down.

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2. The First Skill: Communicate So Clearly They Cannot Misunderstand You

A former Amazon VP once told McAllister after he gave a rambling status update:

“When I ask for a date, give me a date.”

Many PMs make the same mistake — they drown leaders in context instead of leading with clarity.

The top 1% PM communicates with:

• crisp sentences
• specific numbers
• direct answers
• structured writing
• no weasel words

Why does this matter so much?

Because clear communication is a proxy for clear thinking.

If you cannot articulate a problem simply, you likely don’t understand it enough to solve it.

Communication is the skill that every promotion, every resource decision, every cross-team partnership depends on.

And the fix is surprisingly simple:

After every meeting, every written doc, every answer you give — pause and ask:

“How could I have made that clearer?”

This single habit can change your entire trajectory.

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3. The Second Skill: Prioritization Is Your Real Superpower

McAllister describes prioritization as the highest-leverage tool a PM has. Not frameworks. Not creativity. Not clever insights.

Prioritization creates impact.*

The reason is straightforward:

Two PMs with the same resources — one who prioritizes well and one who does not — can produce 5x–10x differences in business impact.

That is the real compounding effect.

But prioritization is not just about sequencing features. It includes:

• Deciding which customer segments matter most
• Choosing which metrics define success
• Cutting features that don’t matter
• Saying “No” more often than “Yes”
• Designing small bets inside large opportunities
• Understanding the ROI of time itself

Great prioritization requires three ingredients:

1. A clear problem statement

2. A ruthless definition of success

3. The courage to disappoint people

Notice that last one.

Because prioritization is fundamentally political.

Not office-politics political — but tradeoff political.
If you cannot turn down requests, push back on bad ideas, or say, “This won’t move the metric,” you cannot be a top 1% PM.

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4. The Third Skill: Execution Is the Currency of Trust

Execution is where average PMs fall apart.

Lots of people can think big.
Few people can ship consistently.

McAllister describes execution like this:

“Product managers are the motive power behind momentum.”

That doesn’t mean PMs do the building.
It means they remove friction, maintain coordination, and keep teams aligned on the next most important thing.

Execution includes:

• writing specs that engineers don’t hate
• sweating edge cases
• keeping the team unblocked
• fixing dependencies before they explode
• measuring launches
• following up
• never letting things drift silently into nowhere

Most people imagine product managers as decision-makers.
But truly elite PMs are momentum-makers.

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5. The Skills That Matter Later — When You Become a Senior PM

As you rise, your toolkit expands.

Senior PMs must become world-class at three additional skills:

Skill 4: Think Bigger Than Your Job Description

The best PMs don’t think in terms of features.
They think in terms of systems, ecosystems, and flywheels.

They start by asking:

• What would a 10x version of this look like?
• What adjacent problems matter?
• How could this expand into a new business line?
• What if we weren’t constrained by current assumptions?

This is the famous Amazon instinct.
At scale, you must “hunt bigger elephants.”

McAllister says the trick is simple but profound:

“Before committing to a solution, always ask: could this be even bigger?”

That question alone unlocks vision.

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Skill 5: Earn Trust Ruthlessly

Trust is an underrated but massively powerful leadership asset.

It determines:

• whether teams follow you
• whether engineers believe your roadmap
• whether leadership funds your bets
• whether partners align behind your decisions

McAllister calls trust “the currency of product leadership.”

Trust comes from:

• saying the same thing to everyone
• forecasting and then hitting your forecast
• owning mistakes publicly
• never spinning the truth
• shipping the thing you promised
• showing up prepared
• seeing problems early and raising them early

You cannot fake trust.
It is built slowly — and lost instantly.

He also shares something deeply honest:

“I wish I had understood the importance of trust earlier in my career.”

Most PMs learn this the hard way.

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Skill 6: Be Driven by Impact, Not Promotion

This might be the most profound lesson.

The top PMs — the ones who rise furthest, fastest — do not optimize for climbing the ladder. They optimize for:

• customer outcomes
• long-term business value
• measurable improvements
• meaningful wins
• real-world impact

Ironically?

Those PMs get promoted more often.

McAllister spent his early Amazon years obsessing over one thing:
“How do I make this metric go up and to the right?”

That focus alone pulled him upward.

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6. The Product Management Lie No One Talks About

People assume you need to be around founders like Bezos to learn world-class PM skills.

But that’s not true.

The skills are teachable.
The discipline is learnable.
The patterns can be practiced.

Amazon’s true contribution to the world of product is not Prime, or AWS, or Alexa.

It’s something far more subtle:

Amazon operationalized a culture where working backwards, thinking clearly, and measuring rigorously became the default.

That culture is duplicable.

You can create it within your own team.

And it starts with the next principle.

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7. The Most Misunderstood PM Skill: Working Backwards

People talk about working backwards as a document ritual.

Write a press release.
Draft a FAQ.
Add some bullet points.

But the press release is not the point.

The template is not the point.

The structure is not the point.

The point is the mindset.

Most teams start with:

• what they can build
• what tech they already have
• what features are easy
• what leadership “seems to want”
• what competitors are doing

Working backwards flips that on its head.

**Ask: What is the problem?

For whom?
Why does it matter?
What would an elegant solution look like?
How would we know it worked?**

If you cannot articulate the problem clearly, you have no business suggesting a solution.

This discipline — when practiced consistently — eliminates 80% of wasted work.

It makes teams faster, not slower.

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8. How Amazon Embeds Working Backwards Into Culture

Amazon institutionalized this mindset using mechanisms:

• Internal press release
• Customer problem statement
• Mock customer quote
• Clear definition of success
• FAQ with hidden complexity
• The “legitimate plan to succeed” test

McAllister shares a guiding question Bezos asked him early on:

“Is this a big idea, is it something Amazon should do, and is there a legitimate plan to succeed?”

Those three tests filter out vanity projects, unclear bets, and premature innovation.

But the real secret is this:

**It forces PMs to think.

Deeply.
Slowly.
Precisely.**

In a world obsessed with speed, deep thinking becomes a superpower.

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9. Why Most Teams “Think” They Work Backwards — But Don’t

You can spot fake working-backwards thinking immediately.

It sounds like:

• “We already have this API, what can we build with it?”
• “Engineering wants to use this new ML model, where should we apply it?”
• “There’s an opportunity to unify these two systems, maybe customers will like it?”

These are technologies searching for problems.

True working backwards begins with:

• real customer pain
• real business friction
• real unmet needs
• real metrics that need to move

McAllister jokes that sometimes a PM writes a great press release — except the “problem paragraph” is mysteriously missing.

Bezos’ response was simple:

“If there’s no problem paragraph, maybe there’s no real problem.”

Painful.
Accurate.
Liberating.

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10. The Hardest Part of PM Work Isn’t What You Think

Product managers often imagine the hardest part is:

• strategy
• design
• influence
• data
• planning

But the hardest part of PM work is far more human:

Getting people to care about the right thing at the right time.

That involves:

• earning trust
• communicating truth
• finding alignment
• removing ambiguity
• giving people clarity
• taking responsibility
• seeing risks early
• protecting engineers
• pushing back diplomatically
• building coalitions
• telling better stories

These are not technical skills.
These are leadership skills.

Which brings us to a truth most PMs don’t realize early enough:

If you cannot lead without authority, you cannot lead with authority.

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11. The PM Flywheel: How Great PMs Compound Over Time

Top 1% PMs think long-term.

Their careers evolve like flywheels:

Stage 1 — Learn to Communicate Clearly

You remove ambiguity, inspire confidence, and become the person people want in the room.

Stage 2 — Prioritize Like a Surgeon

You produce disproportionate impact with limited resources.

Stage 3 — Execute Flawlessly

Your reputation becomes:
“If you give it to them, it will ship.”

Stage 4 — Think Bigger

You connect ideas across domains.
You scale from features → systems → businesses.

Stage 5 — Earn Trust Relentlessly

You stop pushing projects uphill.
People trust you instinctively.

Stage 6 — Drive Impact, Not Promotion

And leadership realizes:
This is someone worth betting on.

This is how PMs become product leaders.

Not through hacks.
Not through frameworks.
Through consistent, disciplined excellence.

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12. The Real Reason PMs Burn Out (And How Top PMs Avoid It)

PM burnout usually doesn’t come from workload.

It comes from the emotional weight of:

• unclear expectations
• hidden politics
• misaligned stakeholders
• shifting priorities
• constant firefighting
• feeling like nothing moves

How do top 1% PMs avoid this?

They design clarity into their process.

They keep the problem statement visible.
They set crisp expectations.
They build trust so friction decreases over time.
They measure so decisions feel less emotional.
They prioritize so not everything becomes urgent.

This is how PMs create calm inside chaos.

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13. The Common Denominator: Thinking Like an Owner

This is the hidden thread through everything McAllister teaches:

Top 1% PMs behave like owners long before they’re given the title.

Owners:

• do what’s right, not what’s easy
• look beyond their job description
• think about the whole system
• obsess over customers
• measure real outcomes
• take responsibility
• grow the business, not their ego

This mindset is what companies like Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Meta, and Stripe reward.

Because ownership scales.
And ownership wins.

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14. So… What Does All of This Mean for You?

If you want to become a top 1% PM, ignore the noise.

Ignore:

• Twitter threads
• fancy frameworks
• trendy job titles
• the illusion of “influence without accountability”
• The obsession with promotions
• The fetishization of “strategy work”

Instead, master the unglamorous fundamentals:

1. Communicate clearly — always.

2. Prioritize ruthlessly — without fear.

3. Execute consistently — no excuses.

And as you grow:

4. Think bigger.

5. Earn trust relentlessly.

6. Wake up every day driven by impact.

This is the real craft of product.

Not the shiny version.
Not the social-media version.
The durable, timeless, battle-tested version.

The version that actually matters.

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15. Final Thought: The PM Career Is Built in Private, Rewarded in Public

The most powerful insight McAllister shares is this:

“You don’t get promoted for wanting a promotion.
You get promoted for having impact.”

Your career will be shaped in the hours no one sees:

• refining your thinking
• writing clearly
• revising documents
• diagnosing broken metrics
• practicing calm communication
• making one more edit to a roadmap
• clarifying a stakeholder’s concerns
• digging for data no one else bothered to find

These invisible habits produce visible results.

In the end, the secret to becoming a top 1% PM is beautifully simple:

**Don’t optimize for the ladder.

Optimize for the work.
The ladder will follow.**

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