Practical Lessons from my Experience in Product
Here are my few lessons by being in different roles and experiencing Product Management:
- Being Minimalistic- Identify a target user base don’t be greedy for every possible user segment. Segments are not just demographics but can be a mobile user, a desktop user, a college student or just people in a specific timezone. Minimalism is not just on user selection, try developing MVP and extend the minimalism to day to day work. Do your homework right.
2. Try building a feature with minimal or NO engineering support. Yes, you hear me right, it takes hell lot of time to go through tech designs, coding and testing so find ways to test your hypothesis through cheap vendors. There are so many who can help you out!
3. Know Your Data: Important! Have them on top of your mind. — Usually, people who want to question your feature idea or just not convinced enough would ask this question. It sucked when a PM came to a meeting and told us about a feature which would be so interesting for people who would travel 6 months from now. Not knowing that bulk of our customer base usually books travel 0–30 days in advance. Do have relevant stats don’t just throw numbers which don’t make sense.
4. Write Good User Stories: It doesn’t matter how much you talk about a feature requirement through presentations, standups, chit chat over a coffee or messaging on Slack/WhatsApp or shouting your throats out. The feature that gets build is the one written in the Jira story.
5. Don’t be a Devil when there is a Disaster: Yes mishaps would happen on any e-commerce site. Do cover your teammates, send out communications, crunch numbers to evaluate the impact, be easy t look for solutions. Provide the cover to your tech team.
6. Talk to Experts: Not just the ones on youtube or a page from the search results of Google. Talk to people who have been in the system for long, talk to the sales guy, the Customer support, the site operations, the network team. They can tell you more about features to improve customer experience than the customer themselves.
7. You are not the Idea Generator: Nothing restrictive about it. Be receptive and build a culture of innovation and creativity. Welcome ideas through Dogfoods or throwing problems on different platforms. You would be amazed.
8. 9 AM–5 PM can’t be done: Most of us work with stakeholders located in different timezones. That would mean late night or early morning meetings. There would be times you won’t have time for dinner and then there would be times where you can go out and have a sumptuous brunch.
9. Learn to Prioritize: You got as much budget and people. Always be on a lookout for a good prioritization technique.
10. Don’t overwhelm yourself: There was a time I used to respond to every email or a text from my customer or stakeholders. It just can’t be a long term thing. It’s ok to slow down a bit and form a way to respond to people by not being anxious.
11. Predictability? — NO: My experience tells me that there is no Science in Product Management. Things would change often and what was important yesterday is no more a priority. We need to address the changing times and competition.
12. Allow Tech Debts: Yes, they are important. New versions of technologies and fixing architectural gaps are very important. It also inspires the geeky developers to put their hands on newer stuff and be motivated. Remember Tech Debts have outcomes drive those discussions around it. It can be like ‘Increased Quality’, ‘Efficiency’, ‘Faster Releases’ and so on.
13. Always ask these questions: Why am I doing this? What are different ways to achieve it? How will I measure it?
14. Speed is a feature: Yes, Don’t get mired in engineering telling you the page speeds. If the App doesn’t open fast or the page doesn’t come fast or the menu items are slow to render, its a feature problem. It doesn’t matter how much money you got if you go to the pizza place to buy pizza when its shut down.
15. FAKE IT: Not easy to build all the required features, some say to build 50% of the features it takes 90 working days. This may or may not be true and depends on the nimbleness of your org. So do a Demand test, put up dummy Campaign Banners, shell out Coupon Codes, Show off various Login Techniques, Add dummy Rewards Points and tell the user it’s coming soon. Not just that, faking also means introducing new product categories for which you may not have the inventory readily available, add them to your site and see what the response is going to be.
16. Metrics — Measuring not Chasing: Build relevant metrics it may not matter how many active users you got or visitors you got.
See their engagement levels- are customers doing various actions on your page?
or do they just drop off from the homepage?
Were you able to make people share your product to others? Does CTO/CTR matter? Go for real metrics which matter not swim in vanity.
17. Talk, Talk and Talk Setup weekly or biweekly meetings with your stakeholders. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have much to talk. A few minutes of conversation can yield many important details and you keep the humane touch with your clients and stakeholders. I experienced that by only talking on days I need to and canceling all other scheduled meetings it builds some distance between individuals. I like to keep up on my meetings; maybe just talking about the status and weather and log off then.
That’s all for now, I am sure this list will evolve. Tell me about your experiences.
Reading has helped me to document, would highly encourage users to checkout on Product Protocol, Hackernoon, Product Management Product Analytics Insights, Product Manager Club