The 10 Commandments of Product Management

Photo by Jazmin Quaynor

1. Know your target market and customer.

• No one should know more about your customer and market than you. Go where they go, eat what they eat and watch what they watch.

2. Empower and unblock your team.

• Freeing up the time to allow your team to do what they do best is a great way to earn respect from the team and fellow product managers. Become the first line of defence!

3. Manage by questions, not by commands.

• Ask people for their input on problems that they have, let them come up with the best ideas on how to execute it. You are just providing thinking points as they move forward.

4. Be clear and precise.

• Speak in the language of the person that you are speaking too. A developer will understand something different than a designer. Your job is to communicate nativity to that person.

5.Communicate openly and frequently.

• Have a running open dialogue (digitally and offline) so anyone has the ability to come talk to you about anything. The more people trust you the more open and honest they will be.

6. Follow the team’s rules and processes.

• You may have set the rules or just fallen into them, but just because you are at the metaphorical top doesn’t mean that you can skirt them!

7. Get feedback (from everyone!)

• Listen to, and go after, other product managers, clients, team and users feedback about you and your product. They will have have a different point of view and will help you craft a full picture.

8. Maintain a roadmap and a prioritized backlog.

• Prioritization means doing the things that are most important first. If you build products, it means doing the things that create the most customer value first.

9. Be positive.

• Your team is relying on you to be the rock, find something to be happy for. Even if its just knowing that the changes of being born at about one in 400 trillion!

10. Get shit done.

• At the end of the day, this is your job, to build and ship product that your customers love!

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