Five Lessons for a Small Team Product Manager
Lessons from one Product Manager to another.
Most of the articles I’ve read about good product management defines a good product manager as someone who:
· “Gets things done!”
· “Is a great communicator”
· “Builds relationships”
Not incredibly helpful when you’re in a company with 3 people. We all get things done. We’re all friends. So what?
This is what I’ve learned so far.
1. No small startups needs a full-time PM
In most small startups, Product Management is a hat you put on, not a full-time job. Expect to use your other skills to add the most value to the company. More often than not, your daily duties won’t even relate to Product Management.
Try including Product Management throughout your day. For instance, talk product in the morning when everyone is getting started, over lunch, or after work over beers. Sometimes that’s enough.
In my early days of product for example, I was also a mediocre designer.
2. Don’t force people to use your tools
If you’re a Product Manager at heart, you can come to a company armed with new tools like Batman with his utility belt. You feel like you have a process for every scenario.
I’ve tried to be the guy implementing sprints for the first time. Or trying to get Github-issues/Jira/Trello/Asana going early. Or getting everyone in a room to talk about personas/company-mission-statement/user stories.
Truth is, you’re over managing. Like your mother trying to get a hat, gloves and a winter coat on you because she saw a snowflake that morning. Your solution needs to be proportional to the problem.
No sprints? Not until the product needs it. Expect an early stage product to be a mad dash. Embrace it!
No task manager? Keep a list of active issues for yourself but don’t expect anyone to look at it. They’re too busy as they should be.
No meetings to discuss product direction? No! More important than a meeting is talking about the product regularly. Drive the conversation into topics you want and watch the answers evolve over time.
3. Getting from A to B can take awhile, so don’t get lost thinking about Z
This is where you and your team need to set your eyes on a Minimum Viable Product. Don’t let your ambitions get the best of you. Get an MVP in mind that tests your most basic value proposition and go there.
At my most recent company, we spent a week talking about how our main dashboard needed to change. That week I took the time to create a whole new design. When it was finally done we asked ourselves “What comes first? Cause this would take a month to build.” We had to bring ourselves back to reality and break the design into reasonable chunks we could build in a week, not a month.
If you set your mind too far in the future you’ll miss the path that’s going to get you there. Focus on the small iterative steps for everyday/every week first.
The grand vision will wait. Build today, adjust tomorrow.
4. Cultivate Conversation
Being a good Product Manager at its essence is getting everyone on the same page and working towards a goal. On a small team, your best strategy is having regular, candid conversations about the product.
If you or your team is looking for answers on a subject just drive the conversation there. Use lunch as your time to get people brainstorming on product questions. Like what will make people love our product? Or talk about something like user retention and see if action items naturally come out of the conversation.
If you’re finding it tough to get the answers you need, that does happen. Try asking a question in a different way. Or bring up an example of how another company answers the same question. Like, “Here are AirBnB’s core values. What makes sense for us to focus on?” Make sure you’re genuinely interested in having a conversation, and not just feigning a discussion. If you’re genuine, you’ll find that people want to weigh in.
Get your team talking. You’ll never find someone more motivated to do a task than a person who thought of the task themselves. As a PM just be there to drive conversations. Don’t force people into meetings.
5. When there are no metrics, gather opinions
All start-ups are looking to back up decisions with numbers. The thing with a small start-up is that you don’t have the numbers yet. The biggest decision start-ups try to make is usually, “what feature comes next?”
People want data to support decisions, but what do you do when there is none? Or the data is so small it’s statistically insignificant to use?
Here’s what you do. Pick what metrics are important to your company. The three most common are Retention, Adoption and Engagement. Now write down a feature and grade it from 1–5 based on its impact on each metric (get your team to agree on the score too). Add the feature scores for each metric together to a total score. Now use this total score as your general prioritization grade.
Now when your team wants to argue about what features to build, bring the conversation back to how it affects your key metrics. If a feature has a high score across the board, then it deserves to come first.
This is how you manage based upon metrics before you have them.
I organize these scores in a Prioritization Matrix (seen below). Check out my most recent matrix for an example. It’s another tool no one will use but yourself.
TL;DR — Your product solution needs to be proportional to the problem. Don’t overmanage. Talking to your team is better than any meeting. Just ask the right questions and you’ll get answers.
