Product Managers: Take Back Your Product Ownership
We’ve all been there: You’ve lost sight of your vision, you barely recognize your product, and you rarely see eye to eye with your team anymore. Product managers are the jack of all trades and must be ready for anything, but you feel like you’re playing a game of telephone with your team and sorely losing.
The changes you want to make to the product have been put on the back-burner, and the product details have become an oversight.
It’s time to take back your product ownership once and for all. As product managers, we must juggle the management of the various development and design teams, while maintaining the vision.
This type of flawless execution is only possible through proper management and leadership, in addition to utilizing a digital platform to save yourself time and energy.
A huge part of product ownership is about taking advantage of the resources available, and that includes researching the digital platforms that enable you to run the product development more efficiently.
Digital platforms allow for complete product ownership by helping a PM reach their full potential while still maintaining their vision throughout the entire process.
I’ve compiled a list of insights taken from some of my favorite product ownership articles, written by top product managers in the industry.
5 insights to take back your product ownership
“Outcomes over features. Focus on delivering great outcomes to your customers. Nothing is more discouraging for a team than delivering great software that no one needs, or not knowing whether your work had impact.”
— John Cutler, Product Ownership: 10 Core Principles
Part of owning your product is about delivering successful outcomes to your users. This involves ensuring a successful product ownership strategy from the start, and following through until the end.
“You are not the CEO of the product, you are the team leader”
— Josh Elman, Let’s talk about Product Management
Leadership is all about setting the stage for your team to succeed and then taking a step back. Working behind the scenes and being available for your team to run ideas by you is much more valuable than being front and center.
“…the distinction between “hard skills” and “soft skills” is largely counterproductive, and that the best product managers possess the connective skills needed to bridge diverse perspectives and roles within an organization.”
— Matt LeMay, The Past and Future of Product Management
Product ownership is about possessing a diverse number of skills, even if you aren’t the one writing code or creating the design, you should still have a wealth of knowledge to offer your team.
“…its core responsibility is to look ahead and inform the builders/operators of the product what the right path is to achieve the goal.”
— Brandon Chu, The First Principles of Product Management
The vision is your baby. As a product manager your must ‘own’ the product vision, otherwise the product will lack direction.
“In a good team, everyone is interested in the product as a whole. In product development, it isn’t good to have a manager who talks about what to do. This is not right. Products, designers and engineers should work side-by-side”
— Samantha Wolhuter, How we made our product building process great again
Leading by example is one of the best management skills out there. Working together with your team to develop the product will generate much better results.
Taking back your product ownership doesn’t have to be a complicated and frustrating process since digital transformation opened up a whole new world of possibilities for product managers.
Digital platforms allow for PMs to reclaim complete ownership of their product by eliminating tedious tasks and easing the process of making changes during the product lifecycle.
