The Product Manager’s survival kit Part 3: An easy path to excellence

PULSE, the 5 steps to climb the Product ladder.

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 3rd and last article.

Part 3: 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 part aimed to reveal the five ones that do the most damage. The second one focused on a short set of best practices to neither fall into the executor trap. This last article shows a way to put them in place smoothly.

A path to improving Product Practices. The starting situation for a PM can be frustrating. Even discouraging. Thrown with stakeholders who do not always understand our role. In the worst case, who believe we are here to execute what they think are good ideas. This is why I envisioned a path in 5 steps as if we were joining a team with the least satisfying practices, overwhelmed by feature requests, and were trying to climb the ladder toward better ones. No level is wrong, what’s wrong is to stay there without understanding that a PM can bring much more. According to Marty Cagan’s terminology, it’s a path to move from a “delivery team” to a “feature team”, and finally to a “product team”.

A path to improving smoothly and safely. When I entered ManoMano, I was asked to draft a vision of my scope so all the operational work could then follow. I loved the approach. But the vision work was very time-consuming, so I was not delivering as much as the team expected. And without a thorough understanding of the scope, the vision proved to be unusable quickly. I found that bringing value and creating trust from day one and progressively delivering all the value a PM could bring was an easy way to drive better Product Practices.

A path validated at ManoMano, that converges with business expectations. Like previous parts, the conclusions presented below have been supported by Product and Business teams from all levels of the hierarchy up to the CEOs. I kept the quotes from our business partners to show how their expectations converged with ours.

Let’s present you the P.U.L.S.E. framework. It is both a path to improve Product practices and a tool to assess the Product maturity of each Feature Team. “P.U.L.S.E” are the first letters of each phase to make it easy to remember and highlight that, as in music, collaboration is at the heart of our role and of this transition. As an orchestra conductor aiming to accelerate the team’s pace of success, we take its pulse and guide it to the next beat. Let’s walk you through it!

🛹 Level 1: PASS business ideas to development

When you arrive on a Feature Team, it’s often a rush. The team has been expecting a PM for weeks and is overwhelmed by a pile of ideas waiting to be developed. Getting the delivery right is an easy way to build confidence, restore some fluidity, and master critical skills. Indeed, however great your feature ideas may be, they won’t have any impact if we can’t ship them correctly. Of course, staying at this phase would be frustrating, it would be more doing the job of Project Manager than Product Manager. Or, in Cagan's words, be a “delivery team”.

Be the bridge between business & tech: In other words, bring business ideas to life by translating them to technical teams. Take the time to explain the whole context and objectives to the engineers so they feel concerned and motivated, lowering the chances of misconceptions.
💼 Business feedback: “I don’t speak the same language as tech and design.”

Ensure roadmap quality and deadlines: With the IT Lead's co-responsibility, make sure features have no bugs and arrive on time. This includes handling dependencies with other teams.
💼 Business feedback: “I need someone accountable for delivering the feature I expect in time.”

Follow up on the feature: The work doesn’t end when the feature is launched. Measure the results and decide to iterate until the expected impact is reached, or to stop.
💼 Business feedback: “I have no clue if the feature has been used and if we can consider it a success.”

Tools & Resources: Agile manifesto

🛴 Level 2: UNCOVER solutions for business needs

Now that the team is able to deliver the expected solutions, the question becomes: are we building the right solutions? This is a big chunk of what we call Discovery. In Cagan’s terminology, this would be the “feature team” stage.

Help business teams formulate their core needs: When you receive a request expressed as a solution, try to understand the underlying need.
💼 “I give solutions — often dirty — only to start the conversation, not to say what should be done.”

Provide new ideas: Complement with ideas sourced from benchmarks and the contribution of every team member (tech, design, business, ..). Design thinking tools can be helpful in harnessing the power of collaboration. The mistake is to believe only Product should come up with solutions.
💼 “It’s hard to trust your ability to find the best solutions if you don’t even know the market standards.”

Ensure relevancy & consistency: Crash-test your ideas with users to limit the risk of building a feature no one would use. Finally, the solution should be consistent with the rest of the product.
💼 “Your 360 vision enables you to find more adequate and consistent solutions than I could think of.”

Tools & Resources: Discovery Discipline

🚲 Level 3: LINE-UP most promising projects

The team is now able to deliver relevant solutions to pressing projects. The next level is: are we working on the most promising projects? At this stage, you would start becoming what Marty Cagan calls a “product team”.

Collect all objectives & constraints: Make sure all stakeholders’ feedback has been considered before suggesting any prioritization. Otherwise, its legitimacy will be rightly disputed.
💼 “How can I trust your prioritization if you have not collected all my needs?”

Display the whole picture: Help everyone involved in the prioritization to grasp the overall context with an easy-to-read holistic representation of the scope. A classic way is the opportunity tree.
💼 “You can take a step back when the business rhythm makes it super hard for me.”

Align on the prioritization: Your role is to facilitate decision-making, so the extended team approves the final roadmap. One way is to share a first prioritization backed with a methodology that clarifies the objective the team is trying to reach and assesses the potential of each topic. Then welcome all challenges and suggest different trade-offs until you reach an alignment.
💼 “You are the natural owners of the prioritization, as you have the Gain vs. Pain vision.”

Tools & Resources: Opportunity Solution Trees, RICE

🏍️ Level 4: SUPPLEMENT with “user-first” topics

The team is now able to deliver as much value as possible from the internal influx of opportunities. But aren’t there more? How can we broaden our perspective? It’s time to enrich the opportunities map with a much deeper and broader understanding of our users.

Understand user problems: Dig up all the clues that allow you to understand users’ behavior and expectations; by talking to them, analyzing their onsite actions, looking at what competitors are doing, etc.
💼 “I expect you to represent customers and be a counter-power to my business objectives.”

Connect with our business objectives: Once you have identified these user needs, expose how solving them would help the company reach its business target.
💼 “You can transform the macro business objectives into client solutions.”

Inject customer satisfaction metrics into the team’s objectives: Let’s say business teams give you the objective to increase advertising revenues by +200%. The constraint is so steep you won’t be able to create a satisfying user experience. The North Star Metrics that guide your efforts should reflect your 2-headed objective: business and users.
💼 “Prioritization is mostly based on Business Volume. Shouldn’t it include more of the NPS?”

Tools & Resources: Continuous Discovery Habits

🏎️ Level 5: ENVISION further than the quarter

The team is now able to deliver on the most important opportunities. But are we paving the way for ambitious projects that will have returns only later? Are we anticipating market evolutions and creating a long-term advantage for our company? We are now equipped to indicate a direction for the quarters to come.

Build an ambitious and shared vision: Addressing the company’s top challenges with a two years perspective brings different results than addressing them quarter by quarter. You can look for more ambitious projects this way, rather than reaching for the low-hanging fruits.
💼 “I expect you to rally all stakeholders, with potential diverging needs, behind a common vision.”

Balance strategic & tactical moves: Once you have the long-term vision, you can integrate it into your quarterly roadmaps. But always trying to achieve short-term goals, by balancing with tactical projects and breaking down long-term ones into smaller pieces that bring value.
💼 “Discussions are very tactical. It’s hard to get +6 months' vision on the product evolution.”

Tools & Resources: From vision to values

The recap of PULSE. As we climb the steps, we are able to deliver value from an increasingly broader perspective.

1. Pass = Ship best features in regard to an expected solution.
2. Uncover = Ship best features in regard to a given need.
3. Line-Up = Ship best features in regard to internal-sourced opportunities.
4. Supplement = Ship best features in regard to all potential opportunities.
5. Envision = Ship best features in regard to the long-term perspective.

What are the next steps for this clarification at ManoMano? As for the Product Myths and the PM survival kit, now that we have the alignment, we need to drive change from it. For this path, it means to embed it at the deepest of our rituals in a gamified way, so it becomes natural and fun to get better. Very pragmatically, it could be used to assess the product maturity of a Feature Team, give quarterly performance objectives or draft our Career Paths.

What do you want to contribute to? I realized that all significant projects — like this PM clarification — didn’t have to be initiated from the top. Plus, I saw I could build it little by little, with 30 minutes to 1 hour daily, alongside my daily tasks. And this proved to be my most enriching experience so far. So, what do you want to get into?

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.