Product Manager Critiques: How to Raise the Bar of Your Product People
People generally have a hard time understanding the objective role that product people play. When other people on our teams don’t understand what product people do, how can we ever get good at it? We have found that getting together frequently as a product people to do critiques raises the quality of all product people.
After college, I started my career at Microsoft in the program manager position. At Microsoft there were excellent resources for PMs including bootcamps, mentorship programs, internal newsletters, and more. Along with all of this support and education came a common statement:
“PMs aren’t useful for the first two years of their lives.”
— A big time Microsoft PM
The reason was that product people needed experiences that could be leveraged. With little experience it was all (product) book smarts and no (product) street smarts.
How do we help all product people be useful as soon as possible?
Learning from our teammates
At Microsoft we would often be on larger teams with other product people since the products were large. I never worked on Office but I did hear there was one PM that handled everything related to spell checking. However, most of our day-to-day was working with engineers or engineering leads directly.
This means that there is little space to get consistent and valuable feedback from people doing the same thing as you. When I have seen product meetings they generally turn into status meetings where people share interesting links they have seen.
The biggest problem for product people is that when someone asks you whether something is worthwhile in doing the right answer is ‘it depends.’ It is highly contextual.
How do we make them better?
Designers have been doing critiques for a long time and it is a core part of programs like Stanford’s d.school. Engineers do code reviews too.
That is why at Philosophie we started using Product Critiques.
The method of Product Critiques
To really get the benefit of Product Critiques you need to do critiques on a regular basis, say weekly, during your regular product group meetings. You do meet regularly with your product group, right?
I have found that you can do a good review in 10 minutes per critique. Maybe you have people sign up in advance or you have them dynamically take spots during the meeting but it will depend on your team.
People getting critiques should bring their presentations, documents, competitive analysis, strategies, and any other artifacts they are using with their teams.
Once you get everyone in the room follow these steps for each Product Critique (get out a timer!):
1 min — Ask for what you want help with
1 min — State the project goals and the audience of the work
3 min — Review the work
5 min — Round robin feedback from other product managers until feedback is exhausted
The amount of time for reviewing the work is so short because all product people should get practice in getting to the crux of an issue fast for their teams. Why not with other product people.
After the first round of feedback it is up to the person receiving the critique if they want to continue. If they do, and there is more critique, you can keep adding 5 minutes.
Rules for presenters:
- No sales pitches
- Presenter should talk less when getting critique, not more
- Leave with a list — you take your own notes
- It is up to the product person to decide to take your feedback (or ignore it) — follow up later with how the feedback/questions helped
Rules for people critiquing:
- Critique, not criticism
- Talk about the work, not the person
- Ask more questions, make less assertions
- Don’t ‘product’ in the meeting — we don’t want solutions yet we just want to make sure that we are considering everything we should
Finally, if you disagree with someone’s feedback that is fine. It is not about consensus. You should make the decision whether you consider what they say.
Get better together
Being a product person is really about how many ways you can look at the world. Some people call these tools or mental models. In the end, it is about how you understand and utilize the right tools to help the team be successful, not just yourself.
Make space within your team to learn from each other. I have found that Product Critiques are a great way to do that and improve everyone’s skills together.
To be less useless as a product person get real feedback from other product people.
