PRODUCT LEARNINGS

How to Elevate Your Product Management Game?

Unlocking Your Full Potential in Product Management through Three Essential Steps.

5 min readMar 16, 2023

Product & Leadership Playbook

Play 15/196 — Challenge yourself

Well, let’s be honest, being a product manager or a product leader is a pressure cooker day in and day out. Balancing objectives on a day-to-day basis is never been easy. I am pretty sure, you like everyone else have to constantly adapt to customer needs, check the newest data trends, screen the market for new opportunities, and build something valuable with emerging technologies. This is why Product Management is an Art to be mastered, it gets too much sometimes. Conversely, to excel in product management, everyone is in charge of their own destiny. You may feel comfortable in your current role, but staying in your current skill set could hinder your growth and limit your potential. To excel in product management, it’s important to step out of your comfort zone and embrace new challenges and opportunities.

“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” — Mary Tyler Moore

As technology and the job market continue to evolve, it’s important that you stay up-to-date on the latest industry trends and technologies. Improving your skill set can help you adapt to changes in your field and remain competitive in the job market. Working in the center field of operations, customers, user experience, communication, tech, and data Product Managers are in a superior position to put learnings into action extremely fast and test the newly acquired skill set.

The Plan

As a product manager, your success is based on your ability to set clear goals, meet deadlines, and take action every single day. While these may seem like simple tasks, they can be challenging to achieve without a clear action plan

Write your goals in the present tense
Writing your goals in the present tense can is going to have a significant impact on your ability to achieve them. When you write your goals in the present tense, you are creating a sense of urgency and accountability. For example, instead of writing “I will increase user engagement,” write “I am increasing user engagement.” The magic behind using the present tense is that by framing your goal in such a way, you are creating a sense of ownership and responsibility that can help you stay motivated and focused to get the work done properly.

Set your own deadlines
Hopefully, you are already used to being in the pressure cooker, so if you want to be effective, go ahead and set your own deadlines, this will be another critical component of achieving your goals. Without a deadline, your goal can become an indefinite task that is never completed. Setting a deadline provides you with a sense of urgency and helps you prioritize your time and resources to achieve your goal. When setting a deadline, be sure to consider any dependencies or obstacles that may impact your ability to achieve your objective. This will help you create a realistic timeline and avoid unnecessary delays.

Create checklists
The PM's best friend is a checklist, and it is an essential tool for advancing in your career in any way and form. The checklist will help you break down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. When creating a checklist, start by identifying the key milestones that are required to achieve your goal. Then, break each milestone down into smaller tasks that can be completed in a shorter period of time. By creating a checklist, you can track your progress, stay organized, and ensure that you are on track to achieve your objective — feel free to do that on Confluence, Miro, or even in your private Jira.

Take action every single day
Finally, taking action every single day is critical, because success is only achieved after a period of time; it requires consistent effort and dedication over time. You are building momentum and moving closer to your goal by taking action every day. This can be as simple as spending 15 minutes each day working on a specific task or completing a checklist item. Making progress every single day will get you closer to your accomplishment to acquire new skills and extend your comfort zone at the same time, you will remain motivated, which can help you stay focused and committed to achieving your objective.

Conclusion
Achieving success requires you to set clear goals, meet deadlines, create checklists, and take action every single day. It's very important to really document and visualize, this is why writing your goals in the present tense, setting deadlines, creating checklists, and taking action every single day, combined will get you to achieve your objectives.
Remember, success is not achieved overnight; it requires consistent effort and dedication over time. Keep pushing forward and never look back.

About the author:

Hi, I’m Lehel. I became a product manager to fuel my curiosity in technology and business management by creating digital products. My journey allowed me to dive deep into product design, user experience, business administration, and learning multiple programming languages. I have been fortunate to lead programs for successful Startups and Fortune 500 companies whereas a leader, my focus is on establishing a great product culture to help people strive by following servant leadership and radical candor principles. In my free time, I write about product management & leadership topics to document the learnings of my past 15 years in the field.

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You can find me at lehelkakonyi.com as well.