My Journey to Becoming A Great PM
Five lessons from my first five months as an Associate Product Manager
In this post, Judy Balaratnam shares five lessons from her first five months as an Associate Product Manager at Accurx, from holding sponge cake retros to leading a pressured update to our flagship product, Accurx Desktop.
January 2022 marks five months since I started at Accurx, a health-tech company that builds communication software for healthcare teams and patients.
I joined as part of Accurx’s Associate Product Manager (APM) programme. The APM programme at Accurx is an intensive six month upskilling program aimed at people from various professional backgrounds who want to make a career shift into product management. If you’re interested in learning more about the programme and how it started, check out Becca’s blog. Becca was Accurx’s first APM (I actually submitted my application for the programme after reading her blog!).
A quick bit of background
As with most people in product management, my professional background is varied, ranging from technical translation to education. In my last role, I was involved in an app development process which sparked my curiosity for the PM world. Though I came to Accurx with little experience in product development, I had the aim of getting stuck in and learning as much as possible from established product managers and real-time scenarios.
Joining Accurx, I had plenty of chances to do this. Within a couple of months, I was tasked with leading on the delivery of a big update to the company’s flagship product — Accurx Desktop. Understandably, this was a daunting amount of responsibility at first. I hadn’t led a product team before nor had loads of exposure to agile methodologies (an iterative approach to product development where we work in cycles to deliver user-value). Considering any hiccups could affect thousands of GPs across the country, it was no small challenge!
But with the support of the product community at Accurx and the lovely members of my team, I learned that the following things make the ride a whole lot smoother:
5 Lessons from an Associate Product Manager
1. Ask questions
There’s a common misconception that whoever’s in charge needs to have all the answers — that’s definitely not the case! As a Product Manager, asking questions and showing that you are willing to learn helps create psychological safety within your team (here’s a blog about this that I found really useful!). This approach helps your team members have conversations to create a shared understanding of what you’re working on and enables everyone to get on the right track sooner rather than later.
I also learned to ask more questions about technical approaches for work on our team’s to-do list so that I could get an idea of which items were more challenging than others. I found that getting into the intricacies of the code base was not a necessity for my role in the team. Instead, having a good balance of technical context was helpful in understanding ongoing problems and facilitated conversations about what my team needed from me to tackle them.
2. Know when the team needs external support
It was by asking questions that I discovered some items of work were taking a lot more engineering effort and time than we were predicting in our planning sessions. Asking more questions and opening up a dialogue on challenges helped me learn that the majority of our UI (user interface, or design) related changes required more WPF knowledge than we had in the team (WPF is a specific programming language used to render user interfaces in Windows-based applications).
Learning this was a huge turning point for our team. It allowed me, as the APM, to request specific WPF expertise support from other teams and stakeholders. Knowing that the team needed external support and knowing where to source this support from enabled our skilled engineers to feel more confident and to be more efficient with their releases.
3. Test as you go
Another learning which helped the team feel confident with our releases was implementing a solid testing process. Given our project was making huge changes to the company’s flagship product — which is used two million times per week by over 100,000 users — we felt some pressure to get things right!
Because of this, we decided to release all of our updates behind a feature flag. This created some space for us to test changes internally without disrupting our users’ experience. As a team, we decided to collectively test each completed component in our local testing environment and provide feedback to the engineers who did the work.
After this feedback was posted in our team’s Slack channel, we made sure to provide screenshots or recordings of bugs wherever possible to communicate the problem with our engineers as clearly as possible. Getting everyone in the team (i.e. engineers and non-engineers) involved in rigorous testing achieved a number of things. One, it created a common understanding of problems we were facing. Two, it highlighted bugs to tackle quickly while the work was still relevant and fresh and, three, it gave us the chance to give well-earned praise to our engineers for all their hard work!
4. Plan ahead for user testing
When I first joined Accurx, our team didn’t have a dedicated user researcher. Because of this, I helped the team out and took on the role to the best of my abilities. I engaged with users ahead of time in order to recruit them to test out our work. Though we had a long timeline planned ahead, we knew that recruiting our target of 30 users for testing would be a challenging task — especially in the healthcare sector, where users are extremely busy and under huge pressure with the demands of the pandemic.
I utilised our user support platform, Intercom, to recruit a range of users early. Fortunately, we got a much larger response than expected! We ended up with over 40 users interested in taking part in our testing process on just the first day and used this opportunity to create a diverse pool of users for our research purposes.
Once I chose the users based on usage, patient list size and location, we kept in touch with them over the following weeks with updates on our ongoing work as we came closer to our finish date. This got users excited and also helped them feel more familiar with our team’s work in advance to our testing stage!
When we got to the point of testing a few weeks later, we had some users fall through (thanks a bunch COVID). But as we had recruited more users than needed to start with, we had back-ups to ensure we were still able to collect a meaningful amount of data to support our testing and learning process. This experience taught me that it’s never too early to start the user recruitment process and you can never have too many users to learn from.
5. Celebrate successes!
Our team had a timeline of 14 weeks to work through. This is a long time to not be releasing work to users in an agile environment — particularly as the rest of the company was releasing something every couple of weeks. This can affect team morale significantly as it can feel like there is no reward for all your hard work.
I learned that it goes a long way to pause and allocate time to acknowledge wins and celebrate successes both on a team and individual basis. It helps bring the team together and recognise the work we have accomplished collaboratively. Midway through the project, I felt we needed to step back for a moment of reflection. So, I decided to run an additional retrospective to celebrate our success so far and improve our ways of working — with the help of some delicious cake, of course!
Retrospectives are dedicated time to reflect on how something went and learn lessons for the future. You can find out more about what makes a good retro in this blog post written by Accurx’s VP of Product, Benji!
Running this retrospective allowed the team to recognise their hard work and gave them an opportunity to voice any concerns and suggestions they might have on how the team had been working up until that point. It was a great team building exercise, an opportunity to gain feedback as the PM and also boosted morale at our halfway point!
These are just five of the things I’ve learned on my journey towards becoming a great PM. It goes without saying that there are so many more learnings I’ve picked up along the way. Reaching the end of the APM Programme, I’m super grateful for the experience I’ve gained from this opportunity so far and am confident that I’ll continue to learn and evolve as a PM and as a person at Accurx! 🙏🏾
If you’re interested in working towards a meaningful mission in healthcare and supporting the NHS, check out our careers page.
