The Product Manager’s survival kit Part 2: The mission & best practices

Finding the balance between principles and flexibility.

This series unveils the clarification of the Product Manager role within the French Scale-up ManoMano. It has been supported by Product and Business teams from all levels of the hierarchy up to the CEOs. You’re reading the 2nd article out of 3.

Part 2: Context and objective. The way of doing Product Management significantly changed with the digital era, introducing new ways of working that we often refer to as the “Product Culture”. Many principles tried to capture them; some were erroneous and created confusion. The first article aimed to reveal the five ones that do the most damage. But even when valuable, they eventually conflict with real-life situations. This article intends to help Product Managers navigate these troubled waters. By clarifying our mission and providing a thorough understanding of the main principles constituting the Product culture. This way, we can know when to use these principles or drop them in front of a greater need.

PM Mission = Lead product evolutions toward the company’s objectives

Mission prevails over best practices. Even in the tech context, our mission has not changed. What is original is the way to reach it. Still, it is essential to have this basic mission in mind because this is the frame that legitimizes any best practices. The mission is the why; the best practices are the how.

Product Management best practices rely on a few principles, mostly specificities of the digital industry. PM best practices bring a new view of the organization’s structure, leadership, and methods. This is because of specificities at the heart of the digital industry and the paralleled emergence of new schools of thought:

• Unprecedented scalability: economies of scale are tremendous in digital, and the boundaries to conquer the world are lower. In this context, many tech companies first aimed for user growth and, backed by Venture Capitals, could deal with monetization only once they had obtained a massive chunk of the market.
• Unprecedented iteration speed: As Remi Guyot phrases it, “digital allows for an extremely short loop between the design of a product, its distribution, and the measurement of its adoption. So quickly that it’s often better to launch something imperfect — and then correct it if necessary — than to try to anticipate what will happen.” This is the foundation on which are built Lean and Agile.
• Unprecedented tracking: every action leaves a trace, which enables tech companies to understand users’ behavior like never before, fine-tune the experience at a precise level, rationalize decision-making, and drive teams with measurable objectives.
• And in parallel, emerged new schools of thought: Like Design Thinking to get better at innovation and collaboration or decentralized organization models to improve the efficiency and motivation of the teams.

Sharing only a short set of best practices. The objective is not to say all the things a PM should do. There is already a lot of literature on it. I tried to extract the most important ones, not to get overwhelmed, still ensuring solid PM foundations. For the same reason, I limited the practices specific to our role. For example, exploring and prioritizing the most promising topics is critical in Product Management, as it is for any position.

A pragmatic selection. What follows is not a romantic vision. It’s a practical set of best practices we aligned on at ManoMano to have the most significant impact where the company needs us. The conclusions presented below have been supported by Product and Business teams from all levels of the hierarchy up to the CEOs. Let’s walk you through it!

1. 🤝 Lead: Responsible doesn’t mean lone ranger

A leader making all decisions might end up operating unilaterally and not benefiting from the wisdom of others. Yet, when ownership is shared, the risk is that no one feels responsible anymore. What if there was a way to reconcile both?

Responsible that the team moves in the right direction
The PM is expected to own their scope: onboard everyone behind a shared vision, prioritize the most impactful topics and ensure that features arrive on time with the right quality. Even if it’s not the PM’s role to make all decisions, it is to ensure these decisions are made by the right persons with all the context required to make them.

In a collaborative way to extract the wisdom of everyone
For a pure player like ManoMano, the product materializes the company’s value. Naturally, some departments want to and should have their word in the decision process. With PMs as the sole deciders, we experienced they were not taking business considerations into account enough. This created a debate about who should have the ultimate authority to make decisions between the PM and their business partners. But what if no one had it? That an alignment needed to be found with the Business Partner, the designer, and the Lead Engineer? The strength of this no-overarching power is to force cross-skills fertilization and stronger reasonings. The PM needs to get better at analyzing and understanding to onboard everyone. Product leads by convincing, not imposing. If an alignment can’t be reached despite everything, it might signify that the topic deserves to be arbitrated higher.

Tools & Resources: Non-Violent Communication, Design Thinking

2.💨 Product evolutions: techniques to maximize successful shipping

Development resources are expensive and scarce, hence an obsession to waste as little of their time as possible, represented by Lean and Agile philosophies. From this stems a progressive and iterative approach that needs empowered teams to work.

Confront risks upfront and all along the way
A great fear of any Product Manager is to spend time building a feature that brings no value to the company. It can be because it’s financially not viable, but most of the time, it’s because nobody wants it. This is why we try to get customer validation as soon as possible, way before launching anything. Then, when we start developments, we try to deliver value little by little, so we can learn about customer adoption and adjust the trajectory. The opposite is making a big plan with a massive rollout. It’s especially true on innovative topics where it’s tough to anticipate what users will resonate with. Rapidly testing, learning, and adjusting is the surest and fastest way to shoot right.

With a team that’s empowered to solve the problem by itself
Such a way of working implies teams that are not following orders from higher in the hierarchy but are empowered to solve the problem by themselves. This is the only way to enable the necessary velocity. As we saw, the team needs to test, learn, and iterate fast. It’s much slower if they have to convince external stakeholders of any change. Especially since the devil is in the details, external people making decisions would lead to suboptimal results. A great benefit of these empowered teams is motivation: how can teams feel motivated when they are imposed on projects to work upon? However, this shouldn’t be considered the default but the arrival state. Naturally, the hierarchy wants to dive in if the team hasn’t proved its ability to deliver.

Tools & Resources: Lean Startup, Reinventing Organizations, Empowered

3.⭐ Toward the company’s objectives: Finding the right balance between users and finances

The PM is an employee of the company; as such, it needs to drive its scope toward its objectives. It’s a mix of serving users and finances, with a balance that should align with leadership’s expectations.

Delighting users
In digital, economies of scale are colossal, and barriers to conquering the world are lower. This explains why there is such a strong focus on delighting users: to capture the market before others and get a huge user base that makes it possible to build a seamless monetization model. It’s also a way to motivate people to make your company flourish.

Delighting finances
This can seem obvious, but it may have been a secondary consideration with the focus on growing the user base and unlimited money in the market. A company’s goal is to become profitable, so it’s inevitable that, at some point, the company will need to make profits. We need to understand the mechanics of it, as well as we know our users, to build solutions that work on both levels. The balance between delighting users and finances is very personal to the company’s situation and the leadership’s convictions.

Driving change with the measure
In digital, any action can be tracked, and any feature A/B tested, which enables us to measure our impact precisely. With this, our mission can be about delivering results rather than a roadmap. Clear north star metrics representing this impact will help guide the team, follow its progress, ensure rational decisions are made, and avoid the soft consensus trap of the collaborative approach.

Tools & Resources: OKRs, Opportunity Trees, Gibson Middle DHM Model

Implementing best practices with collaboration as the common thread. A famous sentence in politics is that no tax, however justified, is worth endangering social peace. Collaboration is at the heart of our role, as we are the intersection between tech, design, and business. When we try to improve product practices, we should do it while preserving cooperation with the same care as social peace for politicians. That’s what we’ll see in the following article.

Indeed, in the following article, I will share an easy path to implementing better Product Practices within your Feature Team.

These conclusions are the fruit of a collaboration involving +70 people. Thanks for your precious insights that nourished this project! If you have any remarks, please share. I’m interested to know if these conclusions apply to your context and what might differ.