What are some common pitfalls that product managers encounter?

Sometimes customers ask for new features without having a good plan on how the feature will be eventually deployed and business value extracted. They push the vendors and hence the product managers put unrealistic deadlines on engineering teams without asking a few fundamental questions to the customers to better understand customer's overall strategy. Achievable incremental targets with clear business goals attached should be part of the process but many times these don't happen before the product manager and engineering jump onto the problem and build the customer's ask.

A product manager needs a split personality. On one hand he should be very responsive and focused on the customer inputs and on the other hand be able to push back on customer specific asks in favor of building a greater configurable product. Also, a product manager should realize that he/she owns the product, but don’t own it at the same time. So, it’s important to keep stakeholder inputs and validation as a priority, and also stay true to preserve the value parameters. As a behavioral trait, it helps to have an iterative mindset with an ability to learn various functions (including finance) that help build an effective commercial product.

A couple of thoughts. First is to be clear whether you are speaking of a Product Manager or a Project Manager. A pitfall of a Product Mgr is to get too deep into the weeds of individual projects aimed at developing, evaluating, launching and terminating a new product. This should be left to Project teams. The second is not spending enough time on proper naming and branding of the product. R&D should never ever name a product going to market. Two cases in point from scientific products: first “alternate meat” when the product has neither the taste nor texture of animal protein. You are setting yourself for failure because of the aspirational name. Second example is Crispr “gene editing”. Could scientists have come up with a name more clearly designed to cause discomfort with potential customers and the media? Spend the time and money to get the brand interface right. Never ever let the group who designed the product give it a name that will survive first contact with any external stakeholders.

A common pitfall that I see is building exactly what the customer/user asks for without truly understanding the pain points and problems you are solving and for whom. Over time, this is what leads to niche features and an unintuitive, complex user experience. To avoid this, Product Managers need to spend more time "falling in love with the problem" than being opinionated on the solution. They should deeply understand what success looks like when they solve that problem - success for the user/customer and the business that creates the product. Only then should you collaborate with peers (Design and Engineering) and get feedback from stakeholders (User/Customer and Business).

In my experience, the first pitfall is "what is the product." Many companies declare a "business" line or group as the product and then relabel their traditional IT organizations to align by-products. In contrast, the business maintains its output-driven demand by working off the same backlog of requests with no measure of benefit. It's more complex than a 1:1 ratio of product to customer. Customer experiences comprise numerous products, requiring multiple product managers, product teams, and the like. This leads to the second common pitfall: the "funding model." Most companies still plan at the organizational level with a traditional people and technology model, not a product. This causes a two-tier system of prioritization. The first tier is at the executive level, where the objectives and strategy are set and sometimes priority. The second tier is where the two and three-down leaders are pushing on the product managers, and IT resources to get their backlog items done that too often do not align with the outcome from the first tier.