Nine Steps to Successfully Start Your New Product Manager Job

How you start your new journey is critical to your success. No matter how experienced you are, starting in a new place as a Product Manager is demanding. You have to learn a lot to lead the team in a successful direction.

I have started a new journey as a Product Manager several times. But not all of these beginnings were successful. Poor onboarding led me to significant failures. The first months as a Product Manager are tough for everyone because most companies don’t have a clear way of onboarding newcomers. Yet, they expect you to deliver value as fast as possible.

What I have learned during my journey is simple:

If you want to be successful, you should take the driving seat. Don’t wait for someone to onboard you, create your strategy and go for?it.

Let me share with you which steps I take whenever I start a new challenge as a Product Manager. Hopefully, you can benefit from it.

1. Understand the Product?Vision

The first thing to do once you start as a Product Manager is to understand the Product Vision. By understanding, I mean gaining clarity on the following:

• What kind of problem the product or service solves
• Who your customers are. How solving this problem makes a difference for your customers
• How the product or service differentiates from the available alternatives

A solid Product Vision will allow you to focus on initiatives to reach the vision. Without a meaningful Product Vision, prioritization becomes an endless challenge. Sadly, you might land on a team without a Product Vision, but don’t panic. You could instead take it as an opportunity and craft the Product Vision with the company leadership.

“If you don’t invest in the future and don’t plan for the future, there won’t be one.” George?Buckley

2. Get to Know the?Roadmap

Once you are familiar with the Product Vision, it’s time to know the roadmap. Most companies have a particular way of crafting roadmaps, showing signs of how Agile they are. You should strive to understand the following:

• Roadmap items: The content can be features to implement or goals to pursue. The first shows low agility as the team has no room to explore different solutions.
• Time: The length of roadmaps varies mainly from quarterly, semesterly, or yearly. From my experience, the longer it is, the less Agile the company is.
• Responsibilities: Roadmaps can be defined on different levels, e.g., teams, products, goals, etc. An agile roadmap should foster collaboration instead of creating silos.

As a new Product Manager, you should focus on understanding how to play the game. After some point, you should challenge whatever slows the team down from delivering value.

“Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.” — Steve?Johnson

3. Successful Metrics

Being a Product Manager means tons of responsibility. You are accountable for the product’s success. Therefore, you should precisely understand how to measure the outcome. Don’t let common KPIs fool you. Many metrics are arbitrary. For example, measuring revenue alone is pointless.

Each product will have different metrics to follow, and it’s your responsibility to ensure you know the ones for your product. Let’s take online shopping as an example. Some relevant metrics would be:

• Conversion Rate
• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Growth Rate
• Return Rate
• Cancellation Rate
• Net Promoter Score
• Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users

Only when you can evaluate the whole picture, you can understand how sustainable your product?is.

4. Business Model

As a Product Manager, you need to know the business model behind your product. Otherwise, you can easily fall into the feature factory anti-pattern. I don’t want to demotivate you, but the reality is sad. Most companies don’t have a transparent business model. Often, the ultimate goal is to make more profits. It’s up to you to bow to the status quo or challenge it.

I think having a business model is non-negotiable because the impact of not having it is too high. Focusing solely on the execution may produce features that will hurt the product instead of generating value.

“Great products are engineered when product managers truly understand the desired outcomes by actively listening to people, not?users.”— Michael Fountain, Director of Product at Apptentive

5. Value Proposition

In combination with the business model, it’s equally important to have a clear picture of the users. Until you empathize with the users and understand their problems, you cannot provide solutions for them.

Once again, my suggestion is simple, if a value proposition is unavailable, it’s your responsibility to make it available. Of course, you can decide to work without it, but if you choose this path, don’t be surprised when users tell you that the solution is worthless for them.

“At the heart of every product person, there’s a desire to make someone’s life easier or simpler. If we listen to the customer and give them what they need, they’ll reciprocate with love and loyalty to your?brand.” Francis Brown, Product Development Manager at Alaska?Airlines

6. Talk to?Users

Any product or service has a simple reason to exist, to improve the lives of a group of people. Once you understand the business model behind your product, it’s time to get real feedback, and the best people to talk to are the actual end-users.

Whenever I start a new adventure, I love talking to customers. It’s always surprising how much I can learn from them. I believe that talking to one customer is better than nothing, but a good number would be from six to eight. The goal is to discover whether end-users benefit from the product or not. Also, you should learn about their pains while using the product and opportunities to help them benefit more.

Still, you should avoid proxies, don’t talk to someone who represents the end-user. This will limit your insights. Only those who use the product can tell you how the product is helpful for them. Other than that is just an opinion. That’s why you should not confuse business stakeholders with actual end-users.

“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.”— Deep Nishar, Vice President of Product at?LinkedIn

7. Talk to Customer?Service

You will get relevant insights when you talk to the users, but that is only the start. You should understand their pains deeply. The best people to share stories with you are the customer service team. They mainly talk to the customers to solve their problems. Almost no customer will contact customer service to say how happy they are with the product.

Although I mentioned avoiding talking to proxies, I perceive the customer service team as a rich source of insights. I’ve learned a lot from them, mainly what frustrates customers.

Establishing an alliance with customer service will help you increase your customer satisfaction.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill?Gates

8. Talk to Product?Teams

Obviously, you have to talk to Product Teams, but what you speak to them is what matters. Developers know the product better than anyone else; you should understand with them which are the challenges with the product, technical debts, bugs, and so on.

Developers are your best partners in building successful products, don’t treat them as a means to an end. Collaborate intensively to solve relevant problems.

Strong relationships with developers lead to greatness, while poor relationships lead to frustrations.

Yet, available disciplines in Product Teams vary greatly depending on the organization. Try talking to people with different expertise. You can learn different perspectives from UX Designers, Product Designers, Data Analysts,s and so on. Be curious, strive to learn, and broaden your perspective.

9. Clean the Product?Backlog

Now that you have a clear picture of the product you are working on, it’s time to clean the Product Backlog. Remove the old to create space for the new. I recommend you be bold and not be afraid of killing dinosaurs.

My approach is simple; I filter all items not updated during the last three months and remove them. I was criticized often because I didn’t invest time in understanding the old items. Well, I’ve done that already, and it’s worthless. It only generates distractions from what matters.

We cannot be Agile if we have a waterfall mindset.

Starting Right Is Key to?Succeed

The first months as a Product Manager are critical for your journey. You will often land on a dysfunctional team, and your responsibility is to help the team escape the traps they face.

Strong Product Managers don’t complain about anti-patterns. They challenge the status quo and do whatever it takes to deliver real value.

• Be bold
• Break the rules whenever needed
• Don’t let obstacles hold you

“When the wind blows, some people build walls, others build windmills.” — Chinese?proverb