What are some strategies to develop business acumen for Product Managers?

Product Managers need to learn the domain. To do so, you need theory and practical knowledge. Reading case studies and industry reports will get you started. Speaking with industry experts and understanding the decision-making would further enhance the understanding of the market.

To improve the business acumen, I believe Product Managers need to come out of BRDs and PPTs. A PM need to imagine and draw the business model in their head first and then validate it through holding conversations with business stakeholders. This helps in refining the business sense and crystallize the understanding of the end to end supply chain, revenue model etc. However, one could also adopt a bottom-up approach. While working with one of my clients, it gave me a great sense of idea about the business by just visiting the physical store and talking to the ground force. One can build up the knowledge from there and connect dots fast. The best is to choose a mix of both of these approaches to close down on the knowledge gap.

Business acumen is crucial for product managers because it aligns product strategy with stakeholders' business goals and value propositions. Understanding how your product fits into the bigger picture and the strategic impact it makes is essential. To improve business acumen, product managers must go beyond BRDs and PPTs. Staying updated on industry trends and customer needs is vital for making informed adjustments to product strategy. Here are some resources to follow #Newsletters and Websites The Ken: The Cap Table: YourStory: The Economic Times: Money Control: Inc42: #YouTube Channels The Neon Show Backstage with Millionaires Indian Silicon Valley Think School WTF by Nikhil Kamath

The Wall Street Journal is a great resource to understand what is happening in your industry or domain. Watching "Squawk On The Street" on CNBC to hear CEOs at tech companies talk about new product launches or earnings releases has also helped me develop my business acumen. As you review these sources, always think to yourself: 1. What problem are they solving? 2. Who is the customer? 3. How can I make the product better?

Go out there and see how your product is used in the real world - what people love about it, and what they wished could be improved. Spend a day in your customer's life, and understand why they do, what they do. Engage with field presales teams, and build a streamlined process to help prioritise ideas. Build a product or feature/function champions group within the business, and work closely with these domain experts.

Here are a few tactical strategies that could help up and coming product managers. - Ask probing questions when talking to cross-functional partners - this uncovers goals, challenges, metrics, and helps you deeply understand needs. - Listen intently to leadership strategy presentations and Q&As - discern broader connections, trends, and reasoning to inform product priorities. - Sit in on customer calls/ interviews - listen to the voice of the customer firsthand for insights others may miss. - Present product roadmaps and proposals to executives - tailor messaging, emphasize business impact, handling tough questions builds savviness.

*sit down with stakeholders from across the business and understand their functional role, their strategic priorities and key challenges *understand how stakeholders interact with and/or support the products and what their experiences and insights are relative to supporting products and end customers based on the role they serve, e.g. Ops, Risk, Compliance, Sales, etc. *join onboarding sessions or a walk throughs of various onboarding offerings based on the different functional areas/departments across the business

The best way to learn is to implement. Pick a problem and start speaking with the users, sales, customer service and marketing. Additionally, you can also speak with risk, legal and compliance teams This will not only help you gauge the problem deeper but also help you discover new set of challenges which could be a potential impact driver.

Communication and interaction is the key to building business acumen. To me "business acumen" is fancy corporate jargon for relationship building. Connect with the people and processes that are being changed. Understand the day to day. It goes a long way towards effective implementations.

Ce qui a le mieux fonctionné pour moi : 1. Accompagner des commerciaux en rendez-vous prospect ou client 2. Faire et se former au Customer Success en bin?me avec un CSM aguerri 3. Ecouter des appels à chaud ou à froid de commerciaux

Practice makes perfect. We all read many books every year, but how much of it do we really retain. Retention comes through consistent application. As Product Managers continue to acquire business acumen, they can start developing a Business Acumen cheat sheet for themselves and then document for which scenarios are they using which concepts. As a more robust and thorough cheat sheet is developed, and as it has been applied on a regular basis, business acumen to Product Manager would become natural.

Once you have the problems prioritised, you engage with the concerned teams to start discussing solutions. Apply frameworks and get reviewed by the peers. The best way shall be to pilot a product and run experiments to evolve the product to suit the user's goals The goal here shall be to get users to a quick win.

During my job experience, I saw all of the stages that lead to the manufacturing of a product while adhering to a highly strict validation process. However, this did not always take into account the imagination and willingness to embrace market demands, as opposed to the line manager's impositions. Thus, once a software engineer who meticulously followed the product development process decided in his spare time to create the product that he believed would be ideal for the market. When the beta version of his program was complete, he delivered it to the sales team. What was the result? You envision it, right? The previous approach was abandoned in favor of the new platform, developed during an excellent developer's leisure time!

After reading "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, I immediately wanted to apply the Objectives & Key Results(OKRs) framework to the product I was building at Lowe's. When developing OKRs for the first time, I learned how important it is to co-create OKRs with key stakeholders to drive faster alignment. The Product Manager should come up with a first draft based on customer research but refine the OKRs with additional feedback from key stakeholders across tech & business(think: marketing, sales, supply chain, etc.).

Lean startup's approach emphasizes rapid experimentation, validated learning, and iterative development to bring products to market efficiently. By embracing Lean Startup methodologies, product managers can refine their product vision, validate hypotheses, measure and optimize product performance, and effectively communicate the value proposition. Learning and applying Lean Startup principles not only fosters growth and adaptation to the changing business landscape but also empowers product managers to innovate with agility and resilience.

When you experiment and iterate on a product, specially a new one, you uncover new business metrics that have an impact and can be impacted by your next release. Failing fast is the best way to learn, improve and implement that business acumen quickly.

A/B tests are a powerful tool to develop business acumen - there is nothing like seeing results from a quick experiment that delivers value to the customer. But you need to be strategic when executing tests, be sure to: 1) decide on the type of test you will run 2) get alignment on the metric you are looking to optimize - how will you know if its successful? 3) ensure you can actually measure the impact Don't just run a test for the sake of running a test - structure your test to validate assumptions and hypotheses so you can improve your product, and deliver more business value.

Experimenting and trying out different ideas is a smart way to learn about business. It helps product managers understand what works and what doesn't. By doing this, they can improve their products and stay competitive. It's like trying out new recipes until you find the perfect one!

I have always recommended my team to retrospect jointly with your stakeholders. Reflecting upon the brainstorming and product pitch sessions jointly will enable you to find the potential areas of improvement you can make and help your audience understand and participate better. Also, listen to the recordings and assess them objectively (keeping emotions aside) to figure out the repetitive concerns of your audience. It helps you counter issues before they occur Refining your pitch needs practice and reflection at an individual and team level

Retrospectives after each sprint, month or quarter can be a powerful tool to capture lessons. I call it "run the tapes again" - take time to self-reflect on your performance and with your team. For example: Reflect on your last 5 product decisions and ask yourself: 1. If you had all the same information, would I still make the same decision? 2. Did I effectively communicate with my squad(product/tech/UX) and stakeholders? 3. What mistake did I make recently and how I can learn from it to improve in the future? Sometimes retrospectives can become a formality vs. an exercise to get better. Be vocally self-critical, ask for feedback from stakeholders...always look for ways to improve your game.

What are some strategies to develop business acumen for Product Managers? ???? Dig into the financial side of the business. It’s important to become financially literate in the business sense. But this doesn’t happen on its own. Even someone who is naturally good with numbers won’t automatically understand a company’s financial side without digging into it. Some examples of how someone can improve their financial literacy in an organization include: ?? Looking at financial statements ?? Tracking important metrics over time ?? Getting insight from business intelligence data Ask for help if there are metrics you don’t understand.

I'm a strong believer that the best way to get business acumen fast is to start a business. So for people just starting out as product managers I'd strongly suggest starting a new business or launching a new product. Really, any product. There are just so many ways one can start a side hustle nowadays. The low/no-code movement just makes it so accessible. After that you'll probably notice how hard it is to build something people care about, find the right customers and make them actually pay for it. After that, it's all about learning.

I suggest a practical activity for developing business acumen in Product Managers: conducting a 'Business Simulation Game.' This involves creating a simulated business environment where participants make decisions, observe the outcomes, and learn from them in a risk-free setting. How to do? Design the simulation Set Objectives Decision-Making Process Monitor and Apadt Reflect and Learn Repeat with variations with a lot of hurdles.

From my experience, understanding your business model is crucial. I've found it immensely helpful to ask the following questions: ?? - Who exactly are your target customers? ?? - What does your cost structure look like, and how is your pricing model structured? ?? - Are you influencing your customers' top or bottom line? ?? - Additionally, I've consistently found value in voluntarily dedicating time to sales engineering and customer support/success tasks to understand the markets. ?? - In B2B, directly interacting with prospects throughout the sales funnel is invaluable. Building solid customer relationships is essential for having candid dialogues about their business.