My take on product management.
First of all, it is important to note that product management goes far beyond the product manager. We are merely the tip of the iceberg, without the team that surrounds us you would see no fruits from our labour. However, seeing as I’m slightly bias this post is going to be from that very perspective as I want to shed some light on what myself and others in my profession are really doing.
So everyone knows what a product is but they don’t know how you go about managing one. Ask an individual to name a product and it rolls off the tongue instantly. Ask that individual to describe what you do as a product manager and suddenly they’re tongue tied. So what is it that causes this bewildered response? A lack of understanding or a lack of interest perhaps? Ones does not simply manage a product like Facebook or we would all be billionaires, so what does one do?
“Sure what we do has to make commercial sense, but it’s never the starting point. We start with the product and the user experience.”
Steve Jobs
In a nutshell product management is the process of making a product valuable, usableand feasible. These three pillars should guide product decisions as they go hand in hand with one another. Usability impacts feasibility as complexity has almost a direct correlation with usage. And when thinking about usability you have to think of the additional value generated. If the level of value gained from a feature or function is less than the cost to implement clearly there is a feasibility issue. You need to take stock of what is actually achievable given your resources and what is within your sphere of influence. It is a tough act to follow but if you can balance all three you’re on the right road to success.
So how would you go about balancing the above? By being sandwiched between vision and reality product management is ultimately about enabling. But this enabling isn’t a part time job as product management battles on three fronts; technology, design and customer. At a high level on the technology front you empower development and implementation teams to come to informed decisions. Regarding design you provide insights from research and feedback to enable your designers to create an impeccable user interface and experience. While on the customer front you work tirelessly to ensure their needs and wants are balanced against value and business return.
Key Tasks
As a product manager you are the voice of the user inside your organisation and that voice needs to get inside many heads. As such you’ll find yourself undertaking a variety of tasks.
- Understand the problem
Knowing what you are about to create and its reason for creation are imperative. Product management is about ensuring the users needs are truly met so you will be probing your market for their pain points and motivations. We find personas particularly useful for this. User needs also sit within a wider domain which means that in order to successfully manage a product you have to keep your eyes open to the changing dynamic around you.
- Understand the product
When you feel comfortable in understanding the domain and your users you then need to understand the product itself. Here at ucreate we utilise user story mapping to map the product features before whittling them down to what we are going to concentrate on, the MVP. These features will be those offering the most value and should be linked directly to key performance metrics and the problem you are trying to solve.
- Facilitate designs
You now need to transfer all your knowledge into a valuable, usable and feasible design. This means spending time with your designers and utilising their strengths and your personas to produce a product that hooks your users into repeat use. Your domain and user knowledge should aid the design as you understand where the value lies. Your designers will then work on the user experience to ensure a smooth flow and then together you decide on the feasibility of the options presented. Don’t be shy of sharing designs with others as the aggregation of their feedback will only improve and guide future iterations.
- Communicate requirements
Clearly communicating requirements is very important as you don’t want today’s problem to be tomorrow’s. Here at ucreate we use behaviour driven development (BDD) to help guide our development team. We provide a comprehensive scenario from the point of a specific user and detail what they would deem a successful outcome from their action. The scenario provides the functional logic required to piece together the development actions needed to fulfil the acceptance criteria. Daily communication and weekly catch ups are recommended in order to ensure all requirements are understood. Check out this post by Dan North which explains BDD in more detail — click here.
5. Testing
Once development work is deployed it is time to start testing to catch any errors. Product managers should lead demonstrations and welcome UAT at this stage to retrieve feedback. Through the process of validated learning the product manager will adjust or pivot the development plan to meet the user’s requirements. There is no point continuing down a path that was agreed upon weeks or even months ago if the feedback you receive rejects it.
- Other
The above points offer a high level overview of the type of activities involved in product management up until the point you have a minimal viable product. All the while road maps, marketing, sales and commercial strategies will need to be sketched out in order to provide your product with the best possible chance of success. It is important to not be narrowly sighted on development alone as you need to utilise systems thinking to envisage how all components fit together and influence each other. This is why we have specific functions for each type of activity. Trying to do it alone is only going to result in many sleepless nights, a product that falls short of expectations or even worse, both!
Recommendations on approach
Below are two recommendations to what makes for good product management. Individual styles may vary so while these work well for me they may not be a good fit for you.
There is a pressing need for a relaxed yet focused approach. You simply don’t know everything so don’t try to act like you do. Everything should be treated as an unkown until you have real data to prove otherwise. Your hunger to learn should be driving you forward. There is a need for small scale iterative learning where wasted effort is limited as much as possible. Otherwise known as validated learning, this process will enable you to be very focused in your efforts but relaxed enough to know that you’re not going to get it right 100% of the time. By working in small batches you can quickly confirm whether your assumptions had been correct and whether you are on the right path. If you were wrong you can stop, review and plan accordingly. As long as you are learning you are not wasting your effort.
Another point to consider is that your project will need a buffer. While operating on a weekly or bi-weekly basis you want to be aggressive on tasks but not on your sprints. Your tasks should be challenging but you should not be short sighted. You are working towards a goal and it is not going to be a smooth ride all the way, so you need allocate buffers to your project. These buffers should be taken into account when reviewing your sprint; you are not falling behind you are using your allowed capacity. As long as you are mindful of the burn rate this will help keep the project on track. Remember we are relaxed but focused on the details. A deadline missed by a day or two is not a problem. Repeatedly missing your deadlines is.
A final thought; get yourself out there! You are not going to come up with the world’s next best product by locking yourself away. Real feedback, wherever you get it from, is vital in the success of any product. People claim success comes from being in the right place at the right time but the way I like to see it is that success comes from asking the right questions at the right time. Ask the wrong questions and you build the wrong product. Ask at the wrong time and it has either already been built or you’re trying to run before you can walk. Ask the right questions at the right time and who knows where that will take you.
