What Kind of PM You Are - Zodiac Edition
And ideal pairings for Tech Leads and Designers
♈Aries (March 21 - April 19)
You’re a natural born leader. You’re confident, decisive, and always ready to charge ahead. Your nature makes it clear that you don’t need research to make any decisions, and any setbacks can easily be explained away by the incompetence of others. You’re not afraid to take risks, because after-all, it’s the company’s money, not yours, and 50% of all ideas fail anyway.
For a Tech Lead, find a Sagittarius who shares your enthusiasm and energy, and will put it all behind your next best decision!
For a Designer, go for a Gemini who will bring fresh and dynamic experiences to users that keep them guessing every step of the way!
♉Taurus (April 20 - May 20)
You’re reliable and steady. Your stubbornness is underappreciated, and your ability to stick to the plan no matter what new evidence is presented is unprecedented. While others are daydreaming to create new solutions, you take your ruler and smash it back against your beautifully articulated roadmap, a Picasso of art, and expect others to stay in line.
For a Tech Lead, find a Virgo, who will appreciate your attention to detail on your beautifully drawn gantt chart masquerading as a Roadmap.
For a Designer, go for a Pisces, who needs their whimsy and imagination kept in line by your determination and indomitable will. As they say, nothing breeds creativity like constraints.
♊Gemini (May 21 - June 20)
You are endlessly curious and looking for something new to do. While others see you as scattered and jumping from one idea to the next, you’re just optimizing for starting, which is more than a lot of people ever dream of doing. Your constant ability to shift focus keeps you from getting bored easily, and you’re always throwing out suggestions and wild ideas to your team to keep them on their toes!
For a Tech Lead, pair with a Libra so that you can throw tons of ideas at and let them balance on the scales of “good and bad” feasibility.
For a Designer, go for a Taurus, whose stubbornness and discipline will be continuously challenged with each new idea to go BIGGER AND BOLDER! There’s no echo chamber to see on this team!
♋Cancer (June 21 - July 22)
You are sensitive. You are nurturing. You describe yourself as an empath. <insert eyeroll emoji here> You look out for your team’s well-being, and are often the office therapist. Your emotions and feelings guide your decisions to the bewilderment of others who cannot appreciate your genius, but they always know how much you care. You make impassioned pleas to others about your ideas, and almost well up with tears thinking about how your grandmother would benefit from this product.
For a Tech Lead, pair with a Scorpio who will consider your ability to read others helpful in determining what passive aggressive thing to say about them at the next office potluck without hurting their feelings too much.
For a Designer, pair with a Capricorn, whose organization abilities need just a dash of “hey, have you asked yourself where you need to categorize everything a user does comes from?” type of questions.
♌Leo (July 23 - August 22)
You’re charismatic. Your ego is assured, but terrified of looking into a mirror and seeing every insecurity that has ever manifested in your fragile ego. Your ideas are the best, and so don’t waste your time listening to anyone else’s bad ideas. You’re like an Aries, except you think you’re better. You do usually have a clear direction, even if it’s wrong, but it’s important to double down on the only ideas that matter: yours.
For a Tech Lead, pair with an Aquarius, because they don’t need to be the spotlight and will quietly clean up the mess your ego leaves behind.
For a Designer, pair with another Leo who attempts to outcompete your ego by creating designs they consider perfect and escalate every decision to your VP when you disagree.
♍Virgo (August 23 - September 22)
You’re detail oriented and leave love notes to your team in JIRA cards. You're analytical, and focused on self-improving because if you love yourself, someone else will too eventually. While you’re focused on every minutiae of details, be sure everyone knows how seriously you take your job. While you might lose sight of the big picture, no one will doubt your commitment to doing anything and everything possible to make it work, and trying to beg and plead someone to not leave the team.
For a Tech Lead, consider a Cancer, who will consider your ability to focus a true benefit to their ability to please everyone.
For a Designer, pair with a Sagittarius who shows you their latest iteration of your feature they found in your notebook, decorated with little hearts because you think it’s just the best.
♎Libra (September 23 - October 22)
You're diplomatic. You're fair-minded. You strive for balance. In your effort to take in every considerable position, you gather all the research. There’s not an iota of data that is too small to collect to make the best decision possible, and relying on instinct just isn’t in the cards when there are so many stakeholders who have valuable insight and opinions on how to build your product.
For a Tech Lead, pair up with a Gemini, who will be sure to give you endless considerations for how you might develop something, but leave it up to you for a decision as they throw you their next feasible solution.
For a Designer, try finding an Aries who will simply act on their own experience-derived authority to draw whatever suits their understanding.
♏Scorpio (October 23 - November 21)
You’re intuitive. You’re perceptive. You hear the noise and see through it, but are always certain to keep this carnal knowledge to yourself. Secrets bestow power, and you know all of the admin’s hot goss from the break room. You really listen to your users, and you keep the secrets to unlocking powerful personas to yourself, for what good is knowledge to you if it’s widely shared to others and not a vessel to further your success. Why delegate when you know and can do everything yourself? But if you must:
For a Tech Lead: consider a Pisces who will constantly come to you for information because they aren’t decisive and disciplined enough to decide on their own.
For a Designer, pair with a Taurus, whose practical and steadfast stubbornness won’t care about what they don’t know, because they are resolute in their decisions.
♐Sagittarius (November 22 - December 21)
You’re adventurous. You’re always looking for new opportunities (with more pay, time-off, and better health-care). Ever the optimist, you encourage the whole department to make risky bets. After all, you’re not really worried if this product job doesn’t pan out. You probably lied about a third of your experience to land the job, and consider on-the-job experience to be the best anyway, but it doesn’t matter: you’ve a trip to backpack Thailand coming up four months into the job, and it’s already been paid for by your last severance.
For a Tech Lead, pair up with an Aries, who will share your energy and enthusiasm, but do all the really hard work themselves.
For a Designer, get a Virgo, who daydreams so much about the life you lead that it will manifest as a ballad in the love song of their designs.
♑Capricorn (December 22 - January 19)
You are disciplined. You’re focused. You keep your eye on the prize. That next promotion to Senior Product Manager, onto Group PM, and then Director of Product. You are driven to be the next CPO. You are rigid in executing the best ideas, only long enough for you to achieve your next opportunity at advancement, no matter who you have to crush to do so. You keep yourself and everyone on track by micromanaging a tight ship. You might have a heart attack by forty, but dammit, you’ll have the healthcare and money to weather it (unlike the designer you insisted was fired last week for trying to go against you).
For a Tech Lead, an Aquarius will appreciate your responsibility and commitment to deliverables. They’ll do the hard work of innovating solutions, while you keep their dev team in line.
For a Designer, consider a Cancer, who will be so overwhelmed with emotion, they’ll quit before you have a chance to undermine them and have them let go with a hefty severance package. (you sociopath)
♒Aquarius (January 12 - February 18)
You’re innovative. You’re forward thinking. You’re everything they write about in all those made-for-product-manager books. Sometimes you can be idealistic in prescribing to exactly what new theory you just read about “Outcomes over Outputs,” refusing to adapt to the dysfunction within your organization. You try to coach upward, but sometimes end up embarrassing your leadership in front of everyone, because pushing boundaries is sometimes the right thing to do.
For a Tech Lead, pair up with a Capricorn, who will be so driven to exceed expectations, that they’ll make sure that every new process you implement is driven home with each developer, regardless of how many leave the team.
For a Designer, a Gemini is a great choice for someone who loves strict adherence to frameworks as they build seven different designs for one feature, all based on “Jobs to be Done.”
♓Pisces (February 19 - March 20)
You’re the last Zodiac sign and it shows for a reason. You’re always in your feelings, trying to pretend you’re not a fraud, and secretly doing decent work in a chaotic and messy way. Your desktop mirrors your life, with files scattered all about, and no structure to your madness, yet you know where everything is. Your brain is the only filing cabinet you need, and while you are an emotional being, it only helps to inform your work, and often causes you to appear aloof to others.
For a Tech Lead, consider a Scorpio, who will get the office gossip about your latest trist from the admin, and then find subtle ways to convince you that their methods are best, alleviating from you the burden of decision making.
For a Designer, find a Libra whose sense of balance for all positions will be overwhelmed by the messiness of your process and try to document all of your ideas down to be categorized and weighed against user expectations.
