Extreme Ownership as a Product Manager
Once I had a senior colleague tell me he doesn’t see the value I’m brining to the team. It stung deep.
I had been working hard, but clearly hadn’t won him over.
It took some major re-calibrations, but I feel I’ve learned an immense amount since then about being a product manager. For one I read a helpful book called Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win. Nothing like the Navy Seals to teach you how to own your job and your life.
Below are some of the things I have learned about owning my role as PM and bringing value to the team.
Own the backlog
We desperately needed help at my startup. We were falling behind on product development and we had little sense of priorities.
We hired an experienced engineer. His first week he spent his entire time understanding the items on the backlog and helping us think through the priorities. This impressed me. I believe in having a bias for action, but at times you need to think through your priorities before acting. You don’t want to be a rat running on a wheel!
Think before you build-measure-learn. This was true at our startup and its true for every product with a deadline. Own the backlog by knowing what’s in there and having a strong sense of the relative priorities.
Own your strategy
Once you know the backlog priorities, own your own strategy. This is where I fell behind with my senior colleague. He never knew what I was doing because frankly, I didn’t have a clear strategy in mind.
I’ve found it useful to have a simple document that lists my strategic pillars for the next couple of months and my current iteration priorities. When new priorities come in, I weigh them against the strategy document and incorporate appropriately.
> Bonus tip — if a task comes in from a manager or someone higher up ask them to help you with the prioritization. Say “Where would [the next task] fit in as compared with these other items I am working on?”
Own a customer feedback channel
One of the PM’s on VS Code does this marvelously. He has positioned himself in front of the most important customer feedback channel. He always has a pulse on what the customer wants because he engages in the channel regularly.
As a PM, find your customer feedback channel. Can you engage with your customers on Twitter? Start following and get in the conversation. Maybe Quora is the right tool? Wherever your customers are, you want to be there.
Own your metrics
What are your KPIs for your product and for your own work? Seek to understand how those metrics are gathered. Follow the data through the pipeline. Track those metrics and repeatedly go back to them to improve and understand them.
I’ve found it helpful to get my hands dirty with the data. Run a few queries. Build a dashboard or two. Understanding how the data flows will help if the data doesn’t make sense. Occasionally there can be something wrong with the data pipeline and its helpful if you can understand how to debug that. Additionally, when you know how metrics are calculated you can bring better insights to the team.
Own the user scenarios
One colleague I have is persistently attached to “what is the scenario?” I’ve copied this thinking and it has helped me. Its easy to get lost in the minutia of product work. If you’re not careful you can miss out on the most important lens: what is your customer trying to do and are we making it better?
Understand the scenarios (i.e. Job to be done). Walk through your product work with those scenarios. For example, I work on the website for VS Code. One of my main priorities is helping users find our website and download the product. There are a myriad of ways we can do this. We can think about social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, etc. It all starts to become hard to prioritize.
The key is to use the scenario lens. Who is my customer? Well its so and so. What do they do? He works as a developer at a medium sized business. How can we reach them? He likes to listen to podcasts and read news on Hacker News. He follows people on Twitter. Why would he be interested in trying out our product? He wishes his code editor was faster and picked up newer features faster. What does he want to accomplish (key question)? He wants to be more productive with his coding and have his tool help him.
We can now design a customer journey around our user’s profile and scenario. We can think about where he is going to be and how we will reach him.
How do you develop the user scenarios? Talk to lots and lots of customers.
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As PMs we have one key contribution to make to the team: we bring customer empathy to the table. We bring value by really understanding the customer and what they are trying to do.
