The four habits of impactful product managers
Habit n°1 — CARE
A patient goes to the doctor, complaining about an unusually strong headache. “It really really hurts”, says he. How should the doctor react? It’s impossible to grasp someone else’s pain. There are two attitudes. The first type of doctors are bored by the banality of the visit — don’t we all get headaches? — and want to get done as fast as possible. They carry out a routine check, prescribe paracetamol, and tap the patient on the shoulder while sending them away: “it’s nothing, just take some rest”.
The second type of doctors have a different attitude from the start. They are never bored, and easily alarmed. They fully trust their patient when they say that a headache “really really hurts”. They genuinely consider the possibility that it could be serious, maybe the early stage of a malign tumor. So they investigate, ask questions to characterize the pain. In the end they take no chances and ask the patient to go for an MRI. They go as far as personally calling the lab to make sure the patient would get an appointment quickly, and do not rest until they get back the result.
The first type of doctors may treat more patients per day, but the second type of doctors save more lives. Their key to success is empathy. They know the patients count on them. They know the importance of their decisions. They know that the trust they get is not eternal, and needs to be earned again every day. As a product manager, your first task is to be a good doctor, with the same awareness and empathy. Take interest in what people think or feel, and wonder what to do with those thoughts and feelings.
Customers
Sitting at a desk, crunching numbers, it is easy to forget the everyday troubles of those for whom we build the product. Do they use it in the way it’s intended? Do we know what feature they like or dislike the most, and what words do they use to express those feelings? You may have a hard time quantifying these. Something that looks small in the statistics can actually be a major problem for your product, because when it happens, it destroys all the value that the product has delivered to that customer.
Avoiding this bias only requires a bit of discipline. Organize regular encounters with customers. Keep them simple: don’t set any other objective than spending time with them, ears wide open, ready to listen. Don’t send recaps. Don’t try to justify to yourself that every single encounter was useful. Don’t try to take action on every problem you identify. This activity has no immediate ROI. Just be with customers as often as you can, and try to understand them.
Soon enough, anecdotes that customers have told you about will resonate with what you do on a daily basis. Someone comes to you with a problem, and it’s not a theoretical problem, it’s a problem that you know personally, you have a story around it, and you will even be able to think of a first customer persona.
Colleagues
The second group for whom you need to build empathy are colleagues. As I was saying in the introduction, you are surrounded by smart people with diverse expertise, all wanting to contribute. Often times, they will contribute by challenging your strategy or proposing alternative ideas. Even if you think your strategy is perfect (which is never the case), you have a duty to fully listen and understand those alternative ideas. Some of them will look foolish — then pay even closer attention: what you see as foolishness may just be a reality that you are ignorant about.
People won’t trust you with their ideas if they feel like they are throwing a bottle to the sea. So you need to have a discipline for listening. Trigger regular in person conversations with people involved in your projects. During those conversations, do only one thing: try to understand their perspective through active listening. Let them speak without trying to answer, or to look smart. Ask questions. Grasp their root concern, their personal objective. 99% of misalignments are cleared when people have the same objectives and source of information.
But listening isn’t your only job as a PM. You are going to ask others to accomplish tasks: by specifying product features, by writing a design brief, by requesting an analysis. One small habit will make a giant difference there: start any request or conversation by reminding your high level goal, the why. Any request, any conversation, really. For example, don’t just ask an analyst to “fetch the signup conversation rate”. Explain why it matters. For example, you could say: “I have noticed that our acquisition numbers have dropped last month, and I am trying to understand whether our signup flow is performing normally. Can you help me investigate that? I was thinking about looking at the signup conversation rate as a starting point.”
The second approach takes longer at first glance, but it pays off very quickly, because instead of just getting the data, the analyst will be in a problem-solving mindset, and will share with you much more knowledge about the problem. So in the end, you will get more qualitative work done by a more motivated person. Generally speaking, your colleagues will make better decisions when they know why they are doing things, and how they contribute to the big picture of the company. They will feel a sense of purpose when accomplishing a task, and have a sense of shared fulfillment when you reach your goal — together.
If you do all of this well, you will be a more impactful product manager because you will leverage the intelligence and ideas of a very wide group of people, rather than just your own.
Reading advice about CARE
If you would like to know more, Daniel Pink’s A whole new Mind has a great chapter about empathy, but other chapters contain related analyses and advice, so you can definitely read the whole book.
Next articles
Habit n°2 — CHECK: Be rooted in the reality of your product.
Habit n°3 — CRAFT: Illustrate and summarize as much as you can.
Habit n°4 — CATALYZE: Ensure quality decisions and keep a lean mindset.
Previous articles
Introduction: Letter to a new PM.
