From restaurants to products - 3 lessons for every Product Manager

Life is continuous learning. For most of us, lessons come without thinking and we intuit meaning from insignificant or infinitesimal information. For some, this process of synthesizing statistics is second nature.   For the product manager, the action of acquiring knowledge and awareness is a requirement for your success. My drive for continuous learning has taken me from consulting to management into product management and strategy. 

Before starting my professional journey, I spent some time working in restaurants. These opportunities provided valuable experiences, the lessons from which I have taken with me in my journey through life. Looking back, there are 3 lessons that have been critical to my successes in product management.  

Know what your customer wants – without having to ask

Eating out, whether at the most expensive 5-star restaurant or at the local café, is a choice and creates a customer. As your customer, a diner should receive the best service, regardless of their circumstance. To achieve this end, the server cannot wait until asked to visit a table, bring refills, or sometimes a manager. By then, the customer is thirsty, their food cooling, or their temper flaring. 

Likewise, a product manager must be always attentive to the customers’ need and anticipate their desire. You should create products not where the market is today, but where your customers need it to be tomorrow. Whether you are creating a new market or bringing a fork when you hear one hit the floor, customers won’t remain yours if they have to ask for what they want.

All plates come out together – the executed product launch

We all know that feeling when the food arrives at the table and someone’s plate is not there. Missing part of a meal is usually the result of poor planning or execution upstream, but indicates a number of failures in the chain of delivery. Not all food takes the same amount of time to prepare and getting everything out simultaneously takes planning, practice, coordination, and teamwork. 

Products likewise are not simply launched when the development is complete or the first items roll off the production floor; instead, a good product manager is attuned to all of the needs for the successful product launch and understands how long each will take to accomplish. The product manager must be like the chef, starting the pasta 3 minutes before the fish to make sure all dishes are ready at the same time.

Get everything right – or fail on a detail

While food is the goal, eating at a restaurant is ultimately about the experience. In order to achieve a good or great experience, the restaurant must get everything right. The service can be perfect and the food exquisite, but someone’s lipstick on your cup or too loud music can ruin the entire meal. 

A good product manager is dedicated to this excellence in their business. It is not enough to be the most innovative or cheapest or easiest to work with, your product must not fail in any aspect, lest you sour the customer’s experience entirely.

In the face of ever easier marketing and faster solution development, a good product manager must be the server for their customers and deliver flawless value without asking at the right time. Are you a server product manager? What lessons have you learned in a restaurant that made you a better product manager?  Please leave a comment and let me know.

Andrew Robinson - Strategy / Product Management / Technology / Healthcare