The Hitchhiker’s guide to Product Management

Thanks to all of you who have read any of my pieces so far, or even, those that have reached out to show support. I know it’s still only just the beginning -today, this is the firth entry — but it tells me that I'm not alone and others can somehow see the application these product management techniques can have with our lives. I’m only scratching the surface, there’s loads more to come.

But before I get too far in this: Who actually knows what ‘Product Management’ is?

So, let’s do a mini rewind and go through what it involves and answer some of the questions I’ve received speaking to some of you.

To those who have read my work, you will remember:

“It’s my mission in this short piece to not lose you, to not confuse you, and to (dare I say) help you understand it?”

Same thing here and always.

Now into what product management actually is. It isn’t rocket-science, despite attempts from us product managers throwing words like “launch”, “explore” or even the 🚀emoji. The 🚀emoji officially belongs to us. So unless you are an astrophysicists or astronaut — hands off.

Breaking down ‘Product Manager’ literally

Product

A very loose term, which is no surprise in this era of hyper-flexible jobs. I see a ‘Product’ as something a business offers to a customer that they promise can solve their pain or improve their life.

Products can have different characteristics:

• A single thing
• A set of activities performed aka. ‘Service’
• Physical
• Digital

I’ll put this in a table with examples and it should start to make sense.

Manager

Typically a manager means a manager of people but here it is managing the product. I guess, just like humans you are concerned with the ‘behaviour’ of a product, how it performs, setting it up to succeed and to know it inside and out.

People managers out there, do you hear me? This is how you treat people.

So what are the main things a Product Manager does?

Apart from hours of meetings, I see it as 3 things:

1. Creating
2. Maintaining
3. Growing

Creating

Depending on the individual, this can be the reason you get out of bed in the morning. The exciting part. What it’s all about. Can you tell it’s my favourite?

This involves exploring new ideas and building something new for the product or maybe building the product from scratch!

As this is new, most of the work here is on understanding the market and its gaps, customer pains and needs and creating solutions with the customer. You’ll work very closely with a delivery team (more on that later) to build the vision; and will drive forward the launch of this product for the customer to use. The 🚀 belongs here.

Maintaining

Sometimes known as ‘business-as-usual’, this is an often slept-on, and underrated, part of the job. Maintaining a consistent and high-quality product drives great value for a business. Especially as customers nowadays are a lot less loyal and are more strict on their purchases. Here you focus on the operational data (e.g. registered users, active users, subscriptions), monitoring, discussing it, to later make small tweaks to the internal process or product itself.

The very best products keep listening to their users either to fix their problems and build new features for them. When maintaining the product the priority will be on fixing issues that cause the most disruption and affect the most users. How we prioritise is a whole topic in itself, we can talk about that next time.

Growing

This is where the value of a product manager comes in. The ability to look at ongoing trends, the market, competitors and identify opportunities. Another reliable source for opportunities is the operational data, as it can inform you of areas that are scoring low and needing improvement.

Here’s an example scenario. Imagine we ran an online shop and have the following 2022- 2023 (year-to-date) data in front of us.

So what can we see from the data?

We can see the shop is performing better this year; more visitors and they are spending longer each visit, but strangely the number of items they buy hasn’t really moved. This would be an opportunity. The challenge here is: how do we get visitors to buy more items? Do we cross-sell? How are we recommending products? You get the drift.

Once a product manager has their next big opportunity in their sights, they become internal ambassadors, building the case by gathering supporting data and validating ideas with their customers and colleagues.

Who do Product Manager’s work with?

I knew my consulting experience would come in handy one day. Here is a stakeholder map, which shows an idea of the people the typical Product Manager would interact with. This diagramming technique is modeled after an onion-skin so the closer to the middle, the more interaction.

A side note: I find that the stakeholder map can be applied to your own life, I’ll definitely be covering that in a future post.

Here’s a little on each person on that map:

Product Manager’s best pals (Closest circle)

• Data insights: Chances are every business will have certain people living and breathing the data of the product. It can seem overwhelming, especially the somewhat different language they speak, but persevere and true value can be unlocked. Product Managers work with insights teams to understand and translate data into a friendly and exciting storyline to influence others.
• Delivery team: These vary in size but often consist of developers, testers, project managers, product owners (check out the Q&A below for the difference between the roles) and designers. Individually brilliant but together amazing, the team will work together to build a solution driven by the product manager.
• Customer Research: This team is the proxy between the product and the customer. Therefore they will focus mainly on user research and generating ideas.
• Product team: Other product managers and product leads are valuable counterparts to bounce ideas off and lean on for expertise in certain areas of the business.

Product Manager’s backup (2nd inner circle)

• Programme management: There can be a lot of moving parts to all this and these individuals will definitely help make a product manager’s life easier. They get people talking, draw up plans, manage risks, keep people accountable and -I’ve found- always remember the tiny details.
• Live service support: This team handles the customer issues and complaints but often with a huge smile and optimism (in my experience). I wish I had that from time-to-time! As I mentioned, the live service is important as this maintains the quality of the product.

Huge caveat with the above is that it is based on a traditional set up; it’s not the same every single time. This also assumes that the product has external customers. On some occasions the product is for an internal customer (e.g. a reporting tool for finance staff in the organisation), in these cases, the relevant group will be in the inner circle.

Day in life

Here’s an outline of a typical day in the life of a product manager .

I write this after a long day at work and figure today was a jam-packed, typical day.

So here’s how today looked like:

• 9.30am: Breakfast in the office and check emails
• 10am: Jump on internal weekly industry catch-up call
• 10.30am: Daily stand up with development team
• 11am-12pm: Solo work. Writing up and preparing for a later meeting on an upcoming experiment I proposed we run
• 12–1pm: Lunchtime
• 1pm-1.30pm: Coordinating and discussions with delivery team after receiving news of an urgent fix that is needed
• 1.30pm-2pm: Attended meeting to learn the capability of an AI engine that can recommend content to any user on the app
• 2pm-2.30pm: Chaired meeting to plan a new experiment which has revenue implications
• 2.30pm-3pm: Chaired meeting to gather initial requirements on a new product to be built
• 3pm-3.30pm: Attended a meeting with business partnerships team to discuss upcoming roadmap items
• 3.30–4pm: Fresh air outside
• 4pm — 5pm: Attend an insights session from our customer research team
• 5pm-5.30pm: Check emails, plan for the following day.

It’s true, no two days are the same. But one thing that’s consistent is that there are a lot of meetings. As we went through, Product managers interact with different teams on different initiatives. It’s all fun but definitely requires an ability to context switch to best impress in meetings.

Skills to thrive

I thought i’d finish with a mention of what I believe you need to be the very best product manager. This is my opinion, but, hope you trust it, as I’ve observed and researched plenty of the world’s best product thinkers and have had the pleasure of working with exceptional product managers so far in my career.

• Customer-first: Ultimately the product needs to help a customer do something so well that they love and rely on it. In the weeds of a business the voice of a customer often gets lost; Product Managers represent the customers at the table and should regularly chat to them. User-centered-design is a well known practice that preaches keeping the user in the middle of whatever is being done.
• Comfortable being uncomfortable: As product managers are responsible for not only coming up with an idea but exploring and developing it, there will be many unknowns along the way. The top product managers excel in finding out answers, making assumptions and trying things without a great deal of confidence ahead of time.
• Decisiveness: In order to actually get anything done and eventually launch a product decisions will need to be made. The most common decision comes in the form of features for your customer. Do you build X or do you build Y? You will need to gather information, prioritse and make a decision or risk slowing down.
• Energy and personality: Think about all the different people we have gone through today. All those different personalities, view points and ultimately, relationships you need to sustain. You can’t do this job without liking people. Of course, being a joy to work with is important (it’s being professional) but exuding energy makes all the difference. Product is difficult and so maintaining a high-level of energy will drive a sense of urgency and excitement about this opportunity. Energy is definitely infectious and can help colleagues see and feel your vision of the product. Before you know it, others will join your crusade.

Extended thoughts…

Q&A:

Before writing this I gathered a few questions from some of you. If I haven’t covered it above, I’ll answer it below.

Q: Are there different types of product management styles?

A: Every product manager will have a completely unique response to this question. I don’t see a difference in style. There is a core product management skillset, it’s just applied for different products in different environments and industries. Even across industries, there’s no major difference in what product managers do, but definitely a difference in the knowledge and contextual information they need. For instance, I work for a streaming product so I believe I have a solid and growing understanding of the industry, industry-specific terms, and its competitors.

Some differences may creep in with the ‘3 things product managers do’ (above). The individual may enjoy and specialise in ‘Creating’ so they will excel in storytelling or communication skills to influence others. Some of you may wonder if you can be a technical product manager; again, it’s down to preference. Perhaps you enjoy working in the details with your development team and technique architect. Product Managers can wiggle their way into any chat if they wish. Being able to say “no” to some is the trick.

Q:How do you make good plans for product launches and updates, bearing in mind planning fallacy, etc.?

A: It is true that nothing ever goes to plan. I’ve found that any plans or roadmaps are best kept updated throughout the journey. Chances are you will work closely with someone in programme management (depending on your team) who will manage these plans. Most dates on a product launch will be based on the development of the product, so in that case I find developer estimates a vital source of information to any plan that attempts to be accurate.

Of course with any plan you should consider other work or events happening around the same time. The product will naturally form a committee of individuals who have the highest decision-making power, they should be kept updated throughout all the way to just before a launch where a GO-NO GO decision is made by the committee.

Q: Isn’t there a product owner role, what’s the difference?

A: If you asked me this two years ago I would not know the answer.

We’ve established one of the many focusses of a product manager is the development of the product, so working with the delivery team to build the product. This activity will traditionally belong to a product owner who is only delivery-focussed and works on the ground with the delivery team. Product Owners will be able to work following a project methodology (such as Agile Scrum), which is what the delivery team will also follow. The Product manager may also do these activities, but their role spans to more areas. As mentioned, they will look at the market, speak to customers, the business viability — to name a few.

Q: What techniques and strategies do you use to manage products?

A: RICE. Roadmapping. User journey mapping. I can go on and on.

Most techniques are used to assess options, prioritse work, or map out how something is right now vs in future. Those who read my first ever post will know that all I want to do is share these techniques and how they can be applied to improve lives, so watch out for future ‘Life Management’ posts where I will go into this. Sorry for being tight-lipped here, I can’t give away all the goods now! Speak soon.