5 key lessons learned as a Product Manager

1) Setting direction and driving focus are the most important responsibilities of a Product Manager

Setting Direction:

While the business vision may be set by senior leaders in the organization, setting the direction of the product falls under the key responsibilities of the Product Management function.

For a Product Manager, setting direction means to build/re-iterate/translate the product’s strategy to reach the business’s north star.

You may have to do this in various languages (engineering, design, marketing) to meet the needs of the cross-functional teams. As a prerequisite to this, the Product Manager should be well aligned with the leadership team on the business’s vision. Understanding the vision of the business is a key step in setting the right direction for the product. A business may choose to reach a large vision through one product or through a portfolio of products as stated in this article by Blade Kotelly.

A product manager should evaluate the role played by his product on that journey and should choose to strengthen the core/adjacent levers to push the business forward as a whole. A core lever would be a product feature in the product owned by the PM whereas an adjacent lever could be the APIs to enable other products in the portfolio to seamlessly integrate with the core product.

This article from Marty Cagan, the author of “Inspired”, addresses the differentiation between business strategy and product strategy.

Driving focus:

Driving focus is all about prioritization and alignment. While prioritization is discussed in the context of Product Management, the topic usually covers feature prioritization. However, Product Managers should also address prioritization of customer persona or customer segment or geographic region to focus on. Usually, this sort of prioritization is paid less attention to. These key business prioritization should precede feature prioritization.

Feature prioritization can be done through various techniques such as the Kano model, cost-benefit model, democratic voting, customer feedback- driven or purely gut-driven, these prioritization techniques talk mostly about initiative/feature prioritization. However, the Product manager should choose the model that fits his current situation based on his understanding of his customers, business and market.

A general guideline to prioritize features is to go after the biggest pain point for the customer and continue doing that over and over again.

Prioritization among large initiatives varies from prioritization among product modules and different from prioritization of features. Larger initiatives should be prioritized more carefully than smaller bug fixes or product features. For instance, a group of product features can be prioritized for a quarter. The order in which the subset of the features is delivered may be decided based on the complexity of a feature, kind of developer skill sets available in a sprint etc. You can learn more about this in this article by Brandon Chu.

While every feature need not require a mathematical prioritization model, Product Managers should be able to answer why a particular feature was prioritized higher than the other to all cross-functional teams.

Most importantly, document and constantly seek alignment with your cross-functional teams to verify whether the team has understood the scope and the end goal.

2) Saying “No” is the natural sibling to prioritization:

Saying “No” is very important as every “Yes” that you say is inherently saying no to some other feature or a high-impact project. Especially with a very small development team, the product manager has to be very clear in what is the next milestone for the product and how can he get there faster, adding the maximum possible incremental value to the customers and the business.

As Steve Jobs said, “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”.

Your decisions to accept the feature request from a highly vocal sales team member or a customer, unless it fits with the larger product strategy, is going to make the product a clutter. You should be flexible enough to swap positions of product features to address a highly valuable enterprise deal but should not accept anything that does not get you one step closer to your north star.

3) Product Managers should be more of strategic leaders than taskmasters, so plan your weekly calendar

As a Product Manager, you are usually working on multiple projects — defining various features within a product, running initiatives that span across products, evaluating a potential vendor for your platform, implementing an analytics tool for your product, establishing a customer feedback process through internal channels, running your customer advisory group, contributing to a strategic initiative from the leadership, internal product management process improvement planning to name a few. 40 hours a week can be quickly consumed across all these initiatives and I have been in situations where I have been running from one meeting to another. While you may feel busy or sometimes you may feel productive because of your contributions to key decisions in various meetings, without enough time to think through long-term goals for the product or digest information from important meetings, it will become close to impossible to grow as a strategic leader.

Product Managers should be more of strategic leaders than mere taskmasters.

While getting stuff done is very crucial, planning future actions and retrospecting on past actions are more important. As Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, points out in this article, “That thinking, if done properly, requires uninterrupted focus”. One way to gain time is to block time for yourself. I use the blocked time to do 4 types of activities — Plan for future actions, do focused work, learn new things relevant to immediate priorities and retrospect on past actions. I aim at spending at least 50% of the work week (20 hours of 40 hours) on these 4 types of work. The remaining 50% of the work week is spent on recurring meetings, ad-hoc meetings, answering emails etc. I have learned from experience that blocking time in advance is the only way to plan and get stuff done without extending your workday.

4) There is no other substitute for speaking to customers, much better if you can watch them

As a Product Manager, you are looked up to as the customer subject matter expert. This requires you to know your customer problems much better than your customers themselves do. Most often customers do not voice out the root cause of the problem they have or key issues that drive certain behaviors. The only way to know that is to see customers trying to do their work on a regular day and following up with them to understand their actions.

There is no other substitute for speaking to customers; much better if you can watch them.

This helps you build your opinions on the problems specific to the domain area. After all, you are the voice of the customer, how can you not hear your customers’ voices frequently.

Be the user. While you may not be able to reproduce every possible issue in the customer’s world, it is essential for you to test your product very frequently, almost every day. This helps you learn/remember the nitty-gritty details of the workflows and also spot user experience issues and bugs earlier than customers do.

If you have a geographically distributed customer base, try to front-load your customer visits in the first 2 quarters, but be in touch with them throughout the year. Sometimes, budget constraints may limit the number of customer visits you can do in the last quarter.

5) Be the most passionate stakeholder but don’t try to be the smartest person in the room always

As a Product Manager, you have to be the most passionate stakeholder. This means that you should lean in constantly and look for opportunities to enhance customer experience and increase business value. Leaning in calls for working closely with various cross-functional teams, building a sincere and authentic rapport with these teams. While you are not the expert in enterprise sales or building the next awesome engineering solution, you have to ask sincere questions to all these teams to constantly improve the product experience.

The key responsibility of a Product Manager is to be the voice of the customer in every possible way. In my opinion, focusing on the customer’s job-to-be-done is the best approach to build a product. This resonates with an important philosophy in Product Management — Fall in love with the problem and not the (more importantly, ”Your”) solution.

Trying to be the smartest person always conflicts with a key requirement for a Product Manager — emotional intelligence.

As trying to prove that you are the smartest most often connects your opinions with your ego, it leads to heated discussions. Discussions should be sincere but need not be heated.

As a Product Manager, one should have sincere discussions with the goal to choose a solution with the best possible experience to a customer problem. Be open to opinions, choose the best for the customer.

Note: This article was originally posted in Medium.com