Five things I have learned in my first year working in product management
To give you a brief description of how I broke into product management, just over two years ago, I joined Florence, a marketplace for flexible work in the health and care sector as a Customer Success Executive (CSE). With no prior knowledge of the sector or startups in general and a degree in sports development, I felt I was really starting from zero.
After a period of time working here, I started to become more interested in the Product team. Through curiosity, I was helping out with QA testing, liaising more with the product managers, and helping with features in discovery. Before I knew it, I was offered a role as an Associate Product Manager.
My first year in product management has flown by, I have been fortunate enough to be thrown in at the deep end, taking the lead on smaller projects (luckily with the support of my manager and the wider team). I definitely made mistakes as a result but tried to learn from them to improve. Below I explain the 5 key things I’ve learned this year with some examples of how and why.
Always ask another question
One of Florence’s core values, and one that is so important. As a product manager, part of the job is speaking to different stakeholders to understand their problems and learn from their own experiences.
There have been times when a colleague has presented an issue to me and I have made an assumption about what the solution should be without fully understanding the problem. This just ended up creating more work as the solution ended up not being the correct one. Had I asked more questions at the time, we would have sped up that whole process.
Asking more questions has helped me understand the root issue or point they are trying to make. If I am to become a good product manager I have to remain curious on wanting to learn and develop, whether that is: learning from stakeholders, what competitors are up to, as well as any new technology that can help create a world-class product.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate!
2021 has been a great year professionally for me however it would not be right for me to say that it has gone entirely to plan. A particular example was that we tried to simplify the way our workers pick up shifts, leaning into our invite logic. We had intended to simplify our main product offering but ended up doing the exact opposite!
We added in lots of different features within the epic and released all of this in one test. What we thought would’ve been an easy task for our users, that was pivotal for the release to be a success, turned out to be a mundane task for them that was hardly completed by any user without us prompting them to complete it. Something that we definitely didn’t want to release outside of our test group.
In hindsight, we spent far too long trying to perfect this new product before we tested it with real users, we could have broken down the different features, released it in smaller steps, then iterated on the parts that were not so good. This would have undoubtedly improved the overall success of the feature.
At Florence or any startup, things move very quickly. The first product manager who helped me break into product would always say ‘perfect is the enemy of good’, I can now say after this last year, that he is totally right!
Honest data is your friend
I’ve recently become more interested in product metrics. Measuring the success of something that our team has shipped is just as important as any other part of product management, it validates my role and gives us an opportunity to change things if they have not gone to plan.
Although, you have to be completely honest with yourself and with your stakeholders. You can really make data say whatever you want it to. We recently released a feature that has had poor adoption, how I communicated this to everyone was open and honest, it was by no means a failure but something we can definitely improve.
Every product management 101 article will explain that trust is a huge part of the role and this is a great way of earning it from your colleagues and stakeholders. We host ‘Data Fridays’ at the end of our product team standup where we share interesting product metrics with the team and discuss the impact of the features the team has built, sparking debate on how we can iterate to improve too. A great chance to hold ourselves accountable and maintain our vision for the products.
Speak to your end-users
At Florence, I work on our Flex product. Due to our recent success, we’ve created two new worker onboarding hubs to help keep up with shift demand.
Our current reporting pages for worker onboarding were outdated and not suitable. We decided to create a dashboard for our Onboarding Associates, which allowed them to easily view the workers within their own pipelines. I spent time speaking with the team leads of each hub trying to scope out how these should look. Looking back, I didn’t spend enough time talking to the onboarding associates (the end-users).
We found out quickly that the onboarding associates were not adopting the dashboard as we wanted them to, they were reverting back to outdated spreadsheets, which is not good for any involved. As I write this, we have received some good feedback and will continue to try and improve this.
Understand the problem you are trying to solve
It is imperative to always have a rationale for the features we build before we start to build them. Something I, fortunately, learned early on.
Regularly, I think of a solution before I have necessarily thought of the problem. Then when talking to users or looking at data, the problem may not be as big as I first anticipated, which means it will not make our roadmap.
It does not necessarily matter whether the problem or solution comes first, but there should be both before a feature is kicked off with the engineers. Building solutions to problems that aren’t a high priority will create mayhem within the product and also outside of it!
One thing that has helped me this year are the constant discussions that I have with other members of the wider product team; my line manager, engineers and designers. I always find it useful to get a second, third and fourth opinion on an idea that forces me to provide the rationale for a feature, as well as see the solution from a different perspective.
These are definitely not the only things I have learned this year, there is so much that has not made this article and I am sure I will be learning new things all the way throughout my career in product management.
As we enter 2022, we have some exciting plans at Florence which will open up new opportunities for the company, and me. I am very much looking forward to what my second year has to offer!
If you have made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to read this. I hope you have been able to take value from this article whether you work in product management or not.
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