Daily Challenges for Product Managers

Product management is a touch job. I am always asked, and ask myself, what are some challenges that product managers are facing on a daily basis. Product managers make important decisions everyday to move the business forward. It’s very challenging, but rewarding.

Here are some challenges, from my perspective, that product managers are facing every day.

Figuring out users’ needs

I believe this is THE most important job of product manager. The worst thing is building a product that no one uses. So as a product manager, you have to use all kinds of tools to figure out users’ needs. Tools can be market research, competitor analysis, user survey, in-field observation, focus group, brainstorm, management input, inputs from other teams, reflecting on your own experience, etc. But there is no such thing called one tool fits for all. Product manager’s challenge is to use the best tool(s) that they can possibly get to figure out users’ needs. In the process, you have to balance, how do I make sure those are real needs, not fake ones? How can I quickly valid my ideas? What’s the cost and benefits of using those tools? what’s the lead time of getting users’ feedback by using those tools? Four things to consider when you choose a tool: differentiating, actionable, measurable, practical.

Strategizing V.S Operating

You have to do both tasks on a daily basis and you have to balance them on a daily basis. Do you need to kill a feature or add a new feature? How does that impact your product roadmap and your product vision? How does that impact bottom line of your business? Product managers need to answer those strategic questions every day. On the other hand, product managers have to run the business on a daily basis. What’s the status of your current feature? How many features in the pipeline? How to fix bugs?

The challenge is to find a way to balance these two tasks. I have yet to find the best way, but it seems having a product vision and constantly revisiting your product roadmap is very helpful.

Managing requirements: reject ideas V.S encourage new ideas

Inexperienced product managers take all the requirements then prioritize them. Good product managers should have a gut feeling on which feature is good and which is bad, and manager requirement accordingly. Everyday, people from different teams throw different ideas to you. The idea is cheap, but execution is expensive. You cannot take all requirements and evaluate them. It’s just not doable. On the other hand, you have to let new ideas come in constantly, otherwise, you lose the steam of innovating engine. How do you balance that?

Balancing useful features and innovative features

Another challenge is to manage useful features and innovative features. Product manager definitely wants her feature useful. If you take a metrics driven approach, most likely, you end up with some features that you can measure. However, those feature might not be very eye-catching and innovative. If you take an innovative approach, you end up with some features that looks great but extremely difficult to measure. It might look good, but it might not be very useful. How do you balance that?

PS: this challenge assumes those innovative features are just marketing feature, and are not useful. This is not always the case. Also, if a feature is not useful, do you want to call it innovative?

Metrics driven or not

How do you measure the success of your product? How do you measure the success of your feature? To answer those questions, product manager usually come up with some metrics /KPIs to gauge if their products are successful or not. The tricky part, or the challenging part, is you get what you measure. And there are some important things about your product that you cannot measure. So you might end up with optimizing the wrong thing. For example, most people think the app usage is an important metric. Is that always true? If users spend a lot of time in your app, it is probably because they couldn’t figure out how to use it. How do you pick the meaningful metrics to guide your product?

Local metrics V.S global metrics

How do you think about local metrics versus global metrics? How do you balance them? For example, do you want users to unlock their phone quickly with fingerprint? If the answer is yes, they unlock phone super quickly, then users won’t be able to see their lockscreen live photo/Ads/ Promotion/animation in an enough period of time. If your global metric is to increase the engagement /Ads conversion/ brand awareness for your phone, improving “quick unlock” local metrics actually hurt your global metrics. Another example is if you reduct new user signup process, such as getting rid of adding a profile photo, importing your contact list, you might hurt the global metrics of user engagement.

There are definitely more challenges. I will address them in future posts.