2024 marks my twentieth year in product management and it is safe to say our profession has changed a lot during that time. In those early days a lot of development was hunch-driven, without the sophisticated prioritisation frameworks that today give us more confidence in our decision making. There was also a real lack of access to timely product data to help us understand the impact of our work. It was a fun time, but it very much felt like the software development equivalent of the wild west.
To mark those twenty years I’m put together a list of the most important things I’ve learned. I’ll post one a day here for the next 20 days. Some of these things took me a long time to understand, so hopefully this will be useful for anyone starting out in their career as a product manager or leader.
You can’t do everything by yourself If you’re a product manager, being able to mobilise a team and get people excited about the work is the only way you will ever get anything meaningful done. Develop your negotiation skills. Build bridges. Make friends. The strongest product people are those who have enthusiastic and willing collaborators. If you’re a product leader, don’t micro-manage or feel like it’s you who has to come up with all the solutions. Stay close to the work of your team so you can adjust and course-correct where necessary, but it’s a thin-line between ‘on top of all the detail’ and ‘control freak’. Stay on the right side of the line and you’ll make your own life easier by helping your team grow instead of robbing them of learning opportunities. Be a leader of leaders.
If you are not talking to users every week, you’re not doing it right When it comes to user research, doing a little very often is far more effective than running big projects a few times a year. Big agency-led studies can offer a lot of value, but they are no replacement for embedding user insight into your weekly ways of working. It’s easy and inexpensive to create a Slack group for your power users or set-up regular customer interviews. Make talking to users part of your product management routine.
Listen more than you talk If you find yourself doing most of the talking during meetings you might not be benefiting from the ideas and insights of your coworkers. Being a good listener one of the most under-appreciated product management skills. It helps build trust with stakeholders and gives you another valuable stream of ideas and insight. Be curious and ask questions, and give people the time they need to articulate their responses. Don’t turn your meetings into monologues.
Assume the best intentions If colleagues or stakeholders are giving you a hard time, they are not doing it for fun. The chances are they simply have different priorities to the ones you are working to. Understand what those priorities are, and find the areas of common ground. You will be tempted to spend less time with the colleagues you have difficulty working with. Do the opposite. Empathy is a critical skill to develop if you want to be effective AND enjoy your work.
Trust your engineering partners There’s often tension between Product and Engineering. In a well functioning organisation this is a healthy tension based on a willingness to be challenged by the other. Product Managers should challenge engineering but those inquiries should always be founded on the addition of additional business context to the conversation. If you can show trust in their technology choices they will reciprocate with trust in your product decisions. Engineering and Product working well together is the bedrock of a successful team, don’t blow that because of ego.
Over-communicate Product managers are busy people, and the temptation is there to just ‘tick the box’ with communication and do just enough. If you find yourself searching for the email you sent a few months earlier where you communicated a plan that people are now saying they are not aware of, you have failed whether you find that email or not. Think of your communication as a product and your stakeholders as the users. How can you maximise the affordance and impact of your communication for them? Repeat key messages and make product plans visible. Don’t rely on stakeholders having to search for product updates on a wiki. Document your plans but also end a weekly communication and update people on the status of your work. It doesn’t take much time and it will save you a lot of trouble down the road and help build trust in what you and your team are delivering.
Data insight loses impact without qualitative context You might be working in a sophisticated way with product data that helps you understand the behaviour of your customers, but without talking to users you are missing a key part of the story. You won’t understand the emotions of your product’s users by looking at the data, and you won’t learn about the problems you are not solving for them. Balance qualitative and quantitative insights to get the full picture.
Create a product vision statement Clearly articulating the ambition of your product and where you want it to be in 5 years seems like a ‘no-brainer’ but you would be surprised how many companies don’t do this. This can be done effectively in one or two sentences (in fact a brief vision statement is more effective than a long and unfocused one). Articulating a desired destination helps align your whole team around the common goal, helps with prioritisation and sets the right context for solution development and product discovery.
Think of your product/feature as a story Stories are the perfect vehicle for delivering a message, and thinking in these terms can take the quality of your internal communication to the next level. Product storytelling works at the intersection of technology, product and marketing to reinforce solution development by describing your plot (the problem / context) the protagonist (the user) and the denouement (the desired successful outcome). Stories create a response on an emotional level in a way that facts and analysis can’t match.
Build a culture of experimentation and curiosity Delivery is important. If you are not frequently releasing value to customers and the business you are failing. However sometimes you can get so focused on delivery you miss out on opportunities to innovate and discover hugely impactful improvements. Changing your culture is best done a little at a time, but start with creating an experimentation backlog and prioritise good ideas that can be tested inexpensively and quickly. Set a target for the number of experiments you want to run over the coming quarter. To really become an experiment-first team you will need to adopt an A/B testing framework. This will be the real ‘game-changer’ moment.
Make time for personal development Product management is a busy role and personal development is always the first thing to fall to the side when things get intense. Don’t keep putting off reading that new book or watching that webinar until things quieten down. Because chances are they won’t. Make time for personal development now or the chances are there won’t ever be any. If you are struggling talk to your boss and ask them to help you make a personal development plan (you should really have one already!) Good product managers aren’t born they are made.
If you don’t believe in your product, find a new job I’ve a feeling many people will disagree with this, but I believe in order to be a great product manager you have to be passionate about your product. You can only fake it for so long. If you don’t believe in the company mission, or you struggle to get excited about what your product can do for your customers, it might be time to find a new job.
A room full of nodding heads is not always a good thing The presentation went well - everyone loves your team’s proposal. But if it felt too easy it may be because you haven’t asked all the right questions. Take the time to encourage scrutiny and challenges early in the solution development process and examine those concerns with data and research. Getting the tough questions out early in the solution design process will make your work better. Doing this will save you a LOT of time later on.
Build the trust of your design team If Product and Design aren’t working with a combined purpose you won’t solve the problems your customers need solving. It’s Product’s role to help provide context, constraints and a clear framework for the solution design process, and you will need the complete trust of the design team if you are going to succeed. You won’t get this if you just treat them like resource for ‘colouring in’ your feature ideas. Lead with the problem rather than a proposed solution, and adopt a design-thinking based approach for all your solution design.
Imposter Syndrome is real, but you are not alone The first step in dealing with Imposter Syndrome is to realise that virtually everyone feels this way from time to time. You know who doesn’t suffer from it? Sociopaths. Being a product manager can be a lonely gig. Find other PMs to talk with, inside or outside of your company, and you’ll soon learn you are not alone with these feelings. Understand that there is a reason you were chosen for this role, and remember your success stories. Product management is a difficult role and things won’t always go as planned even for the most talented. Learn to deal with your failures positively - what have you learned that will make you even more effective going forward? Congratulations - you just got stronger!
Embrace your inner sales person One important skill often overlooked in product management is the ability to influence others. As a product manager you can’t rely on line-management authority to get things done, everything requires the willing participation of a wider team. Learn how to talk about the value of your ideas in a compelling way and to get people excited. A motivated team will always result in better outcomes The relationship between product and sales is often a strained one, however if your company has a sales team get close to them and ask if you can accompany them on calls. There’s no substitute when trying to develop a skill than to watch a professional at work.
Sometimes you just have to make a decision Research, analysis and consensus are all important, but sometimes you have to move quickly and just make a decision. A product manager who can’t make a decision will lose the confidence of the wider team very quickly. Decision making is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it will get. Really Big decisions require Really Big preparation, but on a daily basis you’ll be faced with many lower-impact decisions that can be acted on quickly to maintain team momentum. In order to be able to make a decision confidently ask yourself the following things: Do you have the problem correctly defined? Do you have a point of insight (from data, from users or from the wider business) that points towards your decision being correct? What is the alternative way forward and why is it suboptimal? Once you have these three things clear in your mind - make that decision.
Focus is everything A great product isn’t one that does many things in a mediocre way. Focus relentlessly on the core problem you are trying to solve for your customers and don’t get get sidetracked by ‘neat’ ideas that distract from that core, fundamental imperative. Prioritisation is widely regarded as the key product management skill, but too many think of this in terms of just ordering a backlog - prioritisation is also about focus. What you DON’T do is even more important than the order in which you do things.
Good documentation is essential to build a learning culture A lot of businesses follow the classic “lean startup” loop (build, measure, learn) but often don’t optimise well for learning by having weak documentation and knowledge management. If you aren’t documenting the outcomes well, a year from now people will repeat all your mistakes again. A problem I see a lot is a failure to define and document clear success metrics for solutions prior to release. If you do this it’s much easier to run a release postmortem and have a useful discussion on why your work fell short/exceeded your initial expectations.
Go for a walk Stress has been shown to significantly impair your cognitive function. You’re not doing yourself, your team or the business any favours by running yourself into the ground. Take a break and go for a walk. Do some yoga or meditate. Find something relaxing to do that you can fit into the spaces between meetings on those really busy days. You need to make the effort to create some headspace for creative thinking, as you can’t do this stuck in a meeting or replying to emails.
One lesson I didn’t include on this list but probably should have, is that continuing to learn is important no matter what stage of your career you are at. There’s always more to learn, and an ever-changing world to keep pace with.
I hope these lessons learned from a product management veteran have been useful. I’d love to hear about the most important lessons you’ve learned in your career to date, or if there is anything on this list you disagree with.
Comentarios