The Top 5 Things I Learned about Product Management in 2019
(and my goals for 2020)
Just over a year ago I started my journey as a product manager.
I’m a big fan of reflecting and goal setting, so I thought I would share my main learnings from my product management journey so far.
The year was crazy, but an exciting one. From starting my studies at CODE, and working on my own product from scratch in a team of 5, where I had no idea where to begin. To working in a startup, and facing completely new challenges with a product that’s live and has thousands of users. And finally participating in a 3-month program (Digital Product School) from September to December, where I learned how to build a digital product from scratch, and where the puzzle pieces from the year all came together.
Whether you’re a product manager yourself, work with one (or many) or are just curious, I hope you also take something away from these learnings:
1) You have to balance a lot of expectations
Being a product manager isn’t easy. You have to balance expectations from your team, the partners you work with, the ones of your customers/users, and even the expectations you have of yourself.
Each of these stakeholders demands a unique way of how you communicate and collaborate on the product you’re building. I underestimated this at the beginning of the year and realized how important it is to have a clear idea of how you’re going to handle your communication and collaboration with these people.
How will you share your ideas/product status? Via email? Slack? Daily stand-ups? What is the communication style? How often will you be in touch with each stakeholder? What is important for each of them to know? What don’t they have to know? How will you avoid miscommunication and misalignment of expectations?
And when it comes to the expectations you have of yourself: how will you make sure they are not too high and not too low? When does it come to a point where you’re just stressed and it becomes too difficult to have fun and determination in building the product? How high do your expectations need to be to create a great product? When is it time to lower (or increase) your expectations?
Going forward into the year with new projects, I will answer these questions at the start of the project, to ensure that handling expectations become easier.
2) Create alignment within your team — always
This goes hand in hand with the previous point because it also relates to managing expectations.
What does ‘alignment’ mean? Team alignment happens when the whole team is on the same page about the product and about how you’re working together. You understand the problem you’re solving, you know what product you’re creating, and what you’re doing next. You know how to communicate with each other. And you have fun!
In the projects I was working on this year, lack of team alignment was the #1 thing holding us back or slowing the team down. It created confusion, conflicts and often there were times when we didn’t move forward at all.
So how did we create alignment?
- having daily 15-minute stand-ups first thing in the morning where we share what each team member worked on the previous day, what we will work on that day, and the things holding us back.
- talking about our vision often
- creating a user story map for the product together and keeping it updated regularly
- creating an environment within the team where everyone feels safe to ask questions at any time
3) Find ways to add fun to the process
Building a great product is hard work (what a surprise!).
That’s why I learned how important it is to add fun team activities to your product development journey. You’re going to spend hours and hours with your team so it’s important to get to know them outside of your project where you don’t just talk about product ideas or the status of your code.
My favorite ways to do this last year were to have regular lunches with the whole team (where it was forbidden to talk about the product!), getting coffees together after an important meeting, and having regular team dinners or drinks.
Another thing that added fun to our process in one of the projects, was doing our daily ‘Pacman activity’ (see the picture below).
One day we decided to create a Pacman shape on the window using our post-its. We had just finished a big meeting and were in need of a break. This is when we came up with the idea of our ‘Pacman activity’. Before our standup at 9.30am every morning we would create a fun prompt (for example ‘What was your craziest dream?’ or ‘What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?’ or ‘What’s one thing you really like about the person sitting next to you?’). Each of our team members then grabbed a post-it, and we wrote our answer on it. We then went around in a circle and shared them with each other.
This created many laughs and helped us get to know each team member better. It even helped us to get inspiration for our product!
4) Every product discovery process is different —
‘A Product Discovery describes the iterative process of reducing uncertainty around a problem or idea to make sure that the right product gets built for the right audience.’ — Source
By working on 3 different products over the course of the year, I learned that the process of learning about your users, defining the problem, and then coming up with a solution to this problem, is going to be different in every project. There is no ‘formula’, and you often have to experiment (a lot) to come up with a way that works for your product.
For one project doing a couple of in-person interviews with your target group might already give you all the insights you need to understand the problem. But for another you might have to spend several weeks observing your users, educating yourself about the problem, talking to different groups of people, and more, until you know what the problem is.
The same applies to find the right solution. It might be the first idea you come up with during an ideation session (which is unlikely). But more often you will have to use a combination of ideation techniques, insights, people and resources to come up with the right solution to your product.
And even when you think it’s right, everything might change when you do the first launch to your user group.
…but having said that, there is a process to make everything easier…
5) The Design Thinking Process — just follow it
I’m not going to lie: understanding the design thinking process took me some time. The first time I read about it in a book about digital service design I was confused. I didn’t understand how the words related and why there were so many loops and arrows. Even after reading about it in detail, I still didn’t understand what each word entailed.
However, after working on several projects and actually experiencing the process, and following it, I now understand how the stages relate to each other and how you sometimes have to jump from the last stage all the way back to the second stage.
Design Thinking is not a rule book, but it’s a process designed to make your life as a product manager (or interaction designer) much easier.
If you want to know more about it, I recommend reading this article by the Interaction Design Foundation. It describes the concept of design thinking in a clear and simple way.
But as I mentioned, in order to really understand it I had to actually work on products, fail and get back on track.
I also learned that if you stick with the process and stay patient, you will eventually create a product that works.
— —
So these were my top 5 learnings.
2019 was all about laying the foundation. 2020 is going to be about doing even better, more impactful work. It’s going to be about learning how to write and understand code better, specializing in certain areas (such as product marketing & psychology), and working on a product that makes an impact (most likely in the health space). I’m going to continue to learn, probably fail, and hopefully succeed, too.
Thank you for reading! What was your biggest product management learning in 2019? And what are you planning on doing in 2020 to become even better? I would love to know about it :)
