It has been an exciting journey filled with new learning, challenges, and discoveries. I'll try to share most of them here.
I met many people as I became a product management manager. They wanted to know my motivations and were interested in moving to product management.
This blog post will give you my view of product management. What key differences do you need to accept as you transition to product management? And what core skills may you need to become a successful product manager?
Do you want to be a product manager?
Product management has seen a boom in recent years. I believe that is why there are so many opinions about product management and what a product manager does.
This is why I need to first clear the air about it. Make sure product management is something you love, not just a job you hate.
People tend to focus on the negative aspects of the job. You might hear things like "You will be the CEO of a product!" or "You can manage multiple teams!" or "You have endless possibilities for new features and products!".
Be aware that if something seems too good to be true, it is probably because of misconceptions like "There's no free lunch!"
I am the CEO of a product.
Let's be clear about one thing. You will need to let go of your ego as a product manager and accept that failures are your responsibility.
At the same time, the success stories are your team's. Teams that work well are those where everyone feels they have control over the product. As a PM, you are responsible for leading your team toward a product vision.
Your role is similar to that of a coach for a team. Your team will be praised if they win. However, if your team fails, you could get fired.
As a PM, I can do many types of work in different fields.
Many people believe that being a PM directly impacts building products. This includes marketing, finance, engineering, and strategy.
Depending on your company's size, you may have dedicated teams for each function. Your role is to communicate, plan, and coordinate with these teams. You should be a champion for your users. Understand their needs so you can collaborate with your dedicated teams to find the best solutions.
Shipping the product is a great experience!
Product management is not a job that offers immediate and concrete satisfaction. It will be a lot of work to make a product or launch a feature.
Finding the right code or designing the perfect user flow is impossible. Shipping a product is like a never-ending game. You learn something new with every release. Then you iterate on it to improve it and then release it again.
The PM role is highly respected!
Product management is a job the company might be able to live without, at least for a while. Nothing would be built without engineers.
Nothing is sold without salespeople. The product will look sloppy without designers. In a world without PMs, everyone fills the gap and lives their normal lives.
Remember that you are expendable as a PM. Although product management is often the difference between winning or losing in the long term, it's important to show that you can do it.
After you've understood the expectations of the product manager role, I want you to have the motivation and the right career path.
Take some time out of your busy schedule to ask these three questions.
- What is your motivation to be a PM? What is your motivation?
- Do problem-solving or problem-solving interest you?
- What makes you think you'll be more successful as a product manager than in your current position?
You could have received my answers, but this would have prevented your self-evaluation. It would also have forced you to fit your answers toward your bias.
Instead, I recommend you discuss these issues with your product manager. You have been working closely with them, and they can help you understand the role of a PM.
You can connect with me via LinkedIn if you don't have one.
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What does a product manager do?
Great PMs go above and beyond to maximize their team's impact on the customer experience and business. Although product management is not always glamorous, there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your product launch and providing value for your customers.
Great PMs go above and beyond to maximize their team's impact on customer experience, business, and profits. Over 80 percent of software companies will have GenAI capabilities integrated into their products by 2026, estimates Gartner.
Product management, like most jobs, requires more attitude than skills. The best product managers are:
- Execute impeccably.
They promise what they will do, and then they do it.
They are meticulous in their follow-through and don't allow details to slip.
They are able to adapt quickly to new tasks and improve quality when they join a team.
- Through research, experiments, and collaboration with cross-functional partners, they relentlessly seek out insight into customer needs and pain points.
They are always correct.
- They will always strive to improve and develop product strategies to maximize business impact so that their teams don't have to worry about whether or not their hard work will be noticed.
They don't care about praise from their peers, Apple design awards, or press write-ups.
- Talk well and listen even more.
Product managers infuse urgency and foster collective creativity.
They also build strong relationships with their teams.
They can create consensus by default, but they are also able to drive difficult decisions when necessary.
They have enough credibility to rally a group around a product strategy.
- Define and track key metrics and align the entire organization around them.
They are able to plan and analyze reliable experiments and recognize when it are not worth the effort.
- You will be immersed in market research, feedback, data, and discussions.
They create compelling, thoughtful narratives that explain where the product should go and how to get there.
- Establish a framework to prioritize and make the right product tradeoffs
This is the most popular representation of Product Management that you'll find when you start researching the job.
This intersection is a minimalistic way of defining the various hats a Product Manager may need to wear. While this does not imply that you should have extensive knowledge in all three areas, you will need to be able to navigate through the various roadblocks, decisions, and prioritizations while building a product.
Learn more about what you should know from each circle.
As a Product Manager, you do not have to code, create mockups or sign deals. Your job is to help your team deliver the right product to their users.
Knowing what a Product Manager does and the job he is supposed to do is vital. You must also be aware of what PMs should avoid doing.
You are the customer, thinking you are it.
While you're in the business of building products for customers, you must remember that you are not an end-user in this development-use cycle.
You can learn to remove yourself from the equation and concentrate on the facts and data that will support the creation of something people want. Avoid planning on the assumption that "this feature is cool to have." This doesn't necessarily mean that it will make customers happy.
Find out who your target audience is and then build for their pleasure.
Your intuition alone can build your roadmap strategy.
This is similar to believing a feature would be cool. While you may have an intuitive feeling about creating a great product, you must also back it up with data.
Customer happiness is the desired end result, leading to increased sales. You can implement A/B testing strategies and feature requests based on user stories. Also, you can get feedback from your team.
Next, build your roadmap using that information and your intuition.
Assume that the vision is yours
Your role is to support your team and remove roadblocks so they can build. Be humble and compassionate. Do not place a priority on a feature just because you think it is better.
Listen to your developers and learn from them how they envision adding features. Don't be afraid of working with people who are smarter than you. This will help you get everyone to support your product and influence your stakeholders.
To get to the point, use fancy tech jargon and extravagant designs.
Your job is to tell your product story and explain how the user experience will improve. We know that storytelling is a craft.
It's important to communicate clearly and concisely and explain the "why" so you can show how the action will impact business results.
Being a good mother, CEO, customer, team member, and friend
While you should do everything your mother asks, when it comes down to creating your roadmap, it is important to consider ideas and back them up with data.
You can be comfortable saying no to every request or task. Otherwise, you won't have a product. Product management is often about being done rather than perfect. So leave room for a finished product and A/B-test potential features.
Then, make version 2.0 or any updates based on intelligent quantitative and qualitative data.
Also Read : Product Managers For The Digital World In 2024
What is different about your current role?
I did many things to prepare for the transition. The most difficult was to let go of my engineering mindset. This doesn't mean you have to abandon your engineering skills.
Still, it does allow you to be a Product Manager and not be influenced by the engineer within. It might be necessary to assume that you will continue in your current role and the PMs. The more you can make an impact as a PM, the sooner you get out of your current role.
These are some of the things that helped me make this transition.
Redefine success
People often consider the effort they put into something to be their success. You can be a great Product manager by changing how you define success.
This means you must calculate your impact on the product and users.
If you don't generate more revenue, retain more users, or solve a common problem, it doesn't matter how many new features you ship.
While the rest of your organization may consider shipping a new feature a success, you, as a Product Manager, might see it as a waste of time if it cannot create an impact.
Send your order early.
You want to see immediate value when you release a major release. Even assuming that you will release the perfect solution without any technical problems the first time, it is unlikely.
Your team has made a huge investment in time and money that has not yielded any results (left diagram).
You can release small pieces of work more often by releasing them less frequently. Because you realize value faster and can learn from your mistakes quicker, it pays off.
In the second graph, value trends more than effort almost consistently. This is what teams should strive for.
There is no "done."
Your job is never over, and your product is never completed. No product is perfect for everyone. It is an ongoing process of continuous development and iteration to improve it.
You are a PM, building, measuring, and learning in a continuous loop.
Another challenge you may face while adopting this philosophy is keeping your team motivated to make small but significant changes.
Engineers love being challenged and working on bigger features. However, as a PM, you must communicate to your team why small improvements are more important than the next feature.
Avoid becoming obsessed with solutions and problems.
It is easy to become attached to a beginner solution that you think solves the problem you are solving. Imagine that you released a feature three months ago that you believe is revolutionary for your product.
However, if you look at your growth numbers, you see little impact.
Obsessive focus on the solution can make it difficult to reflect honestly. If you are focused on the problem at hand, it is reasonable to assume that there will be multiple solutions.
Even if one fails, many other hypotheses can be used to solve the problem.
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Core Product Manager Skills
Over the last year, I spoke to many PMs to learn what they consider the most important skills of Product Managers.
While the responsibilities of a PM may vary in each organization, some skills are essential for an effective Product Manager.
Communication
PMs are information connectors and context builders. Communication is, therefore, everything. As a PM, it is your responsibility to communicate the product's vision and strategy to convince people to follow the goal rather than just asking them to do things.
When communicating with Product & Project Managers, clarity and brevity are the two most important rules. Avoid jargon and speak the language of the person you are talking to. Successful PMs are organized, concise, thorough, persuasive, and well-structured.
Prioritization
Your time is your most valuable resource. It's your job to make sure it gets used well. People will always expect you to do a lot for your product.
Customers, your CEO, and your team will all make requests. As a PM, you have the power to make your own decisions. As your role progresses, you will develop your own method/framework for prioritizing items.
But remember that the core of all of those priorities should be the value and impact you create for your customers. Prioritization should be rigorous and ruthless. You must always pick the most important thing to do at any given moment.
Your other skills as PM can help you identify the most important thing. This includes talking with customers and gathering insights from data.
Analytical thinking
Product managers, who are great at analyzing data, should be able to do it themselves. The capacity to analyze data and offer recommendations and insights to the rest of your team is essential for gauging success, even while technical abilities like coding are not required.
Every feature or action you take throughout the product's life cycle should have measurable results.
Empathic thinking
Empathy can be described as the ability to put yourself in another's shoes and to view the world through their eyes.
It's the curiosity that others have about themselves. You will be more successful when you can identify with the needs of others before you build something.
Empathy is essential for leading a team, particularly PMs, who often have no authority but must be respected and supported by others.
You can better understand your engineer's or VP of sales perspective to see how they view the world.
Making decisions
Product managers must make many decisions each day. These include product prioritization, product design decisions, and bug triage decisions.
The most important decision you make is deciding how important it is. Jeff Bezos touched upon this concept in Amazon's shareholder letter.
You must be fast when you race against time to ship a product. Although it may feel great to be involved in every decision, it will not scale.
PMs should facilitate decisions and care more about making the right decision than whether they are correct. You should be able to structure great discussions, make well-researched tradeoffs, and set timetables. Rarely should you "make the call."
Finally, if you've made it this far and are excited, it's time to get your hands on a product manager position.
Paul is a highly skilled Full Stack Developer with a solid educational background that includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Master's degree in Software Engineering, as well as a decade of hands-on experience. Certifications such as AWS Certified Solutions Architect, and Agile Scrum Master bolster his knowledge. Paul's excellent contributions to the software development industry have garnered him a slew of prizes and accolades, cementing his status as a top-tier professional. Aside from coding, he finds relief in her interests, which include hiking through beautiful landscapes, finding creative outlets through painting, and giving back to the community by participating in local tech education programmer.
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