10 Everyday Product Management challenges (and how to overcome.)

There is never a dull moment as a product manager. Every day brings a new set of challenges, and the circumstances are unique, as are the stakeholders connected to your product. Navigating through these challenges can be tough, yet very satisfying once you see progress on your north star metrics.

As a product manager, you face many challenges every day. From balancing competing priorities to navigating the complexities of the product development process, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But with the right mindset and strategies, you can overcome these challenges and deliver successful products. Here are some common product management challenges and tips on how to overcome them.

1. Managing Expectations and communication: One of the most significant challenges of product management is managing stakeholder expectations. You need to balance the needs of customers, the business, and other stakeholders, all while keeping the product development process on track. To overcome this challenge, always use data to set the right expectations. Having a dashboard on Tableau or Power BI can be useful to align the stakeholders. One can also use weekly meetings with managers or relevant stakeholders to keep track of progress. It is also important to know who the key stakeholders are with respect to the product. Implementing a RACI chart and keeping the relevant stakeholders in the loop is a must.
2. Competing Priorities?—?This is by far the most repetitive challenge that most product managers will face, and it is also not easy to address. At any given time, there will be a lot on the plate to finish, and the feeling can be overwhelming. What I have learned is to spend a lot of time upfront discovering which tasks will have the most impact and prioritize them first. This can be easier said than done, as one will gain more insight into such activities through implementation and subsequent measurement. The most important factor is measuring the output, since if the measurement does not match the expectation set at the onset, some other competing priority should have taken precedence in your sprint planning. Most people (including me) become better at this by doing.
3. Adapting to change?—?As Product Managers, we are always building the future. Some features can be built on feedback, while others are built proactively to test the market and observe how consumers react. Great product teams live in the future and drive change rather than reacting to it. However, there are always new technologies that are disruptive or new features released by competitors that can catch you off guard. In order to stay relevant, it sometimes makes sense to make significant changes to your backlog and adopt features accepted by the marketplace (Product-Market Fit). For example, when Swiggy launched the feature to show real-time driver location in response to customers’ frustration with knowing the status of food arrival, Zomato was caught off guard and simply copied the feature that the marketplace had accepted. This was essential since Zomato had to keep itself relevant, and reinventing this would not have made sense since the problem was already solved.
4. Cross-functional collaboration —Stakeholder management is as crucial as building the right feature with the right metric. As a PM, one has to manage engineers, designers, UX researchers, data scientists, analysts, sales, marketing, and executives. This is no easy task, as communicating across such a wide audience with nuanced communication (both verbal and written) requires knowledge, patience, and repetition of your thoughts. The solution to this is to clearly communicate your thoughts in written form, just like writing a user story. Emails, decks, and presentations should present data, environment, and timelines catering to each segment. Frequently sending crisp and precise written communication and holding retro meetings to align all stakeholders keeps you on track and highlights any edge cases. It is also very important to use the right terminology used by customers and internal stakeholders to connect with them.?
5. Lack of Resources?—?Limited human resources, budgetary restrictions, and time-to-market are day-to-day challenges for a product team. Invariably, you will come up with a feeling that you can’t achieve everything you want to. To overcome this challenge, prioritize the most critical features and find other solutions to maximize your resources. This may require partnering with other solution providers to complement your offering. The Desirability, Feasibility, Viability exercise with respect to your product is very useful in putting across your points and helps in making decisions with executives.
6. Roadmaps?—?In my experience of working as a Product Manager, most of my roadmaps required extensive changes based on customer feedback and changes in the marketplace. By no means am I saying that roadmaps are not important; rather, what I am saying is that the approach to building requires experimentation built into the sprint planning. Experimentation is the heart of hypothesis testing and requires running mini-experiments to validate hypotheses. Several MVP techniques such as the 404 page, Fake landing page, and Wizard of Oz MVP are useful and should be accounted for as about 15–20% of the overall capacity. This keeps you on track to ensure that only the most acceptable features get shipped.
7. Getting a user interview can be challenging —If your product is in the B2C space, you will not find this as a challenge at all. However, if you are building for a unique set of users who are difficult to approach and get hold of, trying some innovative ideas should be easy. For example, try embedding a Google Form into your app with a popup prompt every time there is a successful transaction. To remove friction altogether, integrate a voice recording feature for feedback. If it’s a B2B customer, use demos for feedback. I have also interviewed executives of customer companies for feedback. Although not ideal, it is certainly helpful.
8. Remote Collaboration - In the post-COVID world, working across distributed teams has become the norm. My product has major stakeholders distributed across three countries and four geographies. This can easily disrupt work-life balance and start to affect your health. Keeping your calendar up-to-date, communicating via chat and email (even asking for time to respond), and taking frequent holidays work best.
9. Buy, Build, Partner ?—? SSuch decisions are based on what the market needs and the existing players in your industry. That said, each of these decisions brings its own challenges. Buying requires cash, clarity on exactly what gap in your portfolio of offerings you are plugging, and a clear product-market fit. Building, on the other hand, is a more ground-up approach where the most expensive currency is time. Partnering makes sense where both companies and customers benefit and the companies do not compete. All of this requires thorough target market sizing and an ability to forecast where the market is heading.
10. Personal development- Finally, being a Product Manager means always being learning. This means that you need to keep learning to empathize with customers, engineers and other stakeholders to remain effective. I love learning new things and these days, I am learning about LLM’s, Data Science and Generative AI through courses on Udemy, LinkedIn Learning and more. Learning from industry professionals, in-person meetings and through podcasts is also the best way to learn. If you are like-minded, let’s connect and chat?:)

What challenges do you face? Do comment and share..?