9 Areas to Cover in Product Management (Besides UX, Tech, and Business)
As one of the Product Managers at Pipedrive (a Sales CRM), I’m often asked: “What exactly does a PM do?“. When given this question, I often find myself discussing the role of a PM at length, and in doing so, I’ve begun to notice how many different areas I touch during my talk. That often surprises the listener, and I can tell that they must be thinking “So, PMing is more than just you telling people what to do?!“.
In product management, there is a commonly known diagram of business, UX and tech. Without a doubt, market research and finding/validating sustainable solutions with product designers, and implementing those with the development team are the main focus areas for a product manager. While this part of the job is certainly important, I’ve realized how many more underlying areas there still are to cover. Depending on a company’s size and needs, there might be dedicated departments in each area, which offers great support to the PM. Nevertheless, it’s the product manager’s responsibility to connect to those departments, provide them with essential information and keep them continuously updated.
In this article, I will not discuss PM’s daily communication groups (designers, customers, and developers). Instead, based on my product management experience, I’d like to dig more into the areas that are not so visible, but still part of the full user experience cycle. Let’s dive in!
Areas covered in this article:
1. Content — Does the content represent the value of your feature?
2. Localization — Ok, the text looks good in English. What about other languages?
3. Product — How does your feature relate to other product areas?
4. Research — Are your hypotheses validated?
5. Data — Do you support your decisions with actual data?
6. Knowledge — How do you educate your users?
7. Support — Does support understand the purpose of your product area?
8. Sales — Do salespeople realize what problems your feature solves?
9. Marketing — How do you communicate your product to the world?
Content
Does the content represent the value of your feature?
The product text is essential as it should guide users to the action. If it’s unclear, then the feature might be misunderstood, and as a result, leave the user frustrated and the feature unused (which we don’t want to happen). You want to remember that people may understand the same word/text differently based on their culture, background, and industry they are involved in.
Separate sessions of user testing sometimes are needed to make sure that customers understand what we are trying to explain to them. There have been a few times when I’ve spent half of the day testing just a couple of words to find what would be the best fit. Simply requesting texts from a copywriter without providing context and implementing those to the feature might not bring the best results.
Therefore, it’s essential to contact the content writer early on and explain the customer’s pain points as well as your objective; not just the required text. Doing it this way, you can work together on making sure that the copy provided will lead users to the expected actions.
Tip: create a separate document for the feature copy with the provided details, screenshots, and latest updates. Don’t forget to keep the content consistent throughout the product.
Localization
Ok, the text looks good in English. What about other languages?
Making your product available in other languages is a crucial part of expanding your customer audience and reaching new markets. Thus, there are two situations worth avoiding: 1. Non-English speaking users seeing English messages and 2. Non-English speaking users seeing Google translated texts. Both will leave a negative impression on customers and can damage the reputation of the product. Also, take into account other languages while confirming product designs. In another language the text may be longer and thus unable to fit into the original layouts.
The localization department works across all product areas, thus it’s essential to reach them as soon as possible so that the content will be translated in time. Most likely, the localization team also cooperates with translation agencies outside of the company, which lengthens the translating process.
Another point to consider is that it makes a massive difference how texts are provided to the localization manager. Just plain text won’t give any meaning, and as a result, those translations might not make much sense within the feature context. Make screenshots and describe the purpose of the text to make sure that quality content is there in all languages, not just English.
Tip: remember the copy document you created in the previous tip? Share it with the localization manager.
Product
How does your feature relate to other product areas?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing “my own thing”, which leads to products with disconnected features. As a result, features can sometimes compete with instead of support each other, which reduces product value and complicates the flow.
By viewing the product holistically, we can discover crucial relations between different product areas and find gaps between those. We should aim to find the best way to connect features so that the user gains the most from our product. It boosts the discoverability of the features and helps to experience a smooth flow while using those.
Through early communication with other product managers, we might discover significant blockers and prerequisites for the feature we are planning to build. For example, if I’m planning to develop a new state-of-the-art water bottle for cyclists that is ergonomic, then I first need to make sure the planned bottle shape will fit standard bicycle bottle holders. It can be an excellent bottle type, but what is the value of it if a cyclist cannot use it while on the go?
Tip: regularly catch up and sync with your product peers. Share your current state and plans.
Research
Are your hypotheses validated?
If we build everything we assume is suitable for our customers, then our product will quickly escalate into a mess. Instead of asking “what should we make next” it’s better to ask “what problem should we solve next”?
As a Product Manager, we receive a lot of feedback on our product from various sources — customer interviews, support/sales departments, Slack™ channels, and so on. As a result of this feedback, we create hypothesizes on what customers might need. Having hypotheses is useful and even essential, but it’s not enough to kick off a project as hypothesizes must be first validated. Through early communication with researchers (by early, I mean before a single line of code is written), you can find the best approach for validating your hypothesis. Regardless of research being qualitative or quantitative, it’s crucial to set expectations — what questions should be asked and what answers are to be expected.
The problematic part for a PM is to disprove created assumptions. A PM can be cognitively biased with their product area and try to pay more attention to information that confirms existing beliefs rather than challenging them. It might lead to inaccurate conclusions, thus building features nobody needs. Having a researcher on the PM side is a considerable advantage as the researcher doesn’t have opinions that need to be proven and they can help a PM to ignore their own biases as well.
Tip: do first interviews together with a researcher to make sure you ask the right questions and prevent leading customers to the “right” answers.
Data
Do you support your decisions with actual data?
Data is crucial for decision making as it’s not biased, does not have preferences, and is based on facts. You are fortunate if there is a data analyst next to you who helps to manage, analyze, and find patterns in customer behavior. Not only does it help save a tremendous amount of time for a PM, but it also allows you to drill deeply into data to prove/disprove assumptions or create hypotheses. Data Analysts have skills to slice and dice data for finding less obvious user patterns that can truly help a PM in decision making.
By involving Data Analysts early into feature development plans, you can analyze together the impact that upcoming product changes might have on your KPIs. You forecast the impact and make sure that all needed metrics are in place. It helps to keep essential aspects in mind like how and when you plan to implement further metrics tracking. Also, constant contact with Data Analyst helps to monitor existing metrics continuously and analyze past trends.
Tip: have a data analyst as a full member of your team and keep them updated on all the small changes you introduce to the product. It will help them to link those to the product metric changes and make conclusions.
Knowledge
How do you educate your users?
Video tutorials and feature articles are created to help users to get familiar with a feature and its functionalities. Knowledge producers usually work across the whole organization and need to develop materials for all different product areas. They have more strict deadlines as educational materials should be ready once a release happens. It’s important to deliver these in time as it’s a part of the whole user experience.
Again, as a PM, you should know the most critical flows and aspects that need to be explained in the article and video. Letting knowledge producers figure it out based on feature description or documentation might not bring the best outcome. Instead, collaboration is the key. Share the “why” aspect of your feature and go through the different feature scenarios together, explaining essential details. Do this collaboration throughout the development process as the scope and solution may change.
Knowledge producer’s work depends significantly on a feature’s readiness, as a recorded feature illustration with bugs appearing or outdated feature designs will confuse customers. To avoid, keep your colleagues updated on the progress and let them know when feature designs are finalized and stable enough for creating the materials. It will help them to avoid replicating their work and save both time and effort.
Tip: continuously update the delivery roadmap on your feature page, it should be reliable and easily accessible to help in planning and avoiding delays.
Support
Does support understand the purpose of your product area?
The people in support are on the front lines of your product and because of this, closest to your customers. Support is where users head if they need help, are confused or have a feature request. Showing your early prototypes to the support team will help you in validating your ideas. You might get a reaction like “Finally! This is always being asked for” or “I haven’t heard any customers having a problem with this.”
A Product Manager is responsible for documenting a feature’s “why” detail, specifications, and next plans in a way that everyone can understand and easily access it. Logically structured documentation will help to reduce support agents’ struggles and save you time, as fewer people would need to contact you directly.
Life in support is pretty fast and stressful — so getting answers fast will be much appreciated. As a PM, you should be concerned that your fellow support colleagues know the value of your product area, can help customers and know how to find more information about it if needed.
Tip: hangout in the Support area if you can — besides bonding with your colleagues and helping them on the go, you will get a lot of useful insights into customer problems.
Sales
Do salespeople realize what problems your feature solve?
If you have a sales department in your company, then you surely want them to know the beneficial aspects of your product area. One of the great features of salespeople is that they know the product they are selling very well. It might sound obvious, but I think we’ve all experienced a salesperson’s lack of knowledge about a product that we were intending to buy, right?
It’s easy to blame salespeople for this, but they’re often very hard-working individuals with a high level of stress and an income that directly depends on their sales results. Therefore, instead of sending them another product documentation link in addition to others they already have, organize periodical meetings to explain the customer pain points your feature is solving and the ways a customer can benefit from the feature the most.
Potential customers need to understand how a new feature will benefit them most, instead of just a list of functionalities for the feature. It’s also relevant to keep the sales department informed on upcoming features and changes. Salespeople can introduce those to potential customers, which can increase the appeal to the product and become one of the main decision-makers.
Tip: salespeople know a lot about customer issues as they speak to them daily. Ask about recent “complaints” during your meetings and use the opportunity to connect to some of the potential customers for your market research.
Marketing
How do you communicate your features to the world?
Don’t get me wrong — discoverability of the feature should come primarily within the product. Nevertheless, marketing is there to support the product by promoting it. It helps to boost awareness and bring more new users into the product.
The competition is high, and there are a lot of products to choose from. Ads and campaigns come from everywhere, and it’s a big challenge to make your product stand out from others. Potential customers are more likely to be interested if we promote our product in the language they use and can thereby relate to. Instead of telling how great your product is, you can talk about what problems it solves for your target group.
A Product Manager knows these aspects the best. Systematically and openly sharing those insights with the marketing team will help to create a message that reveals the product value that customers can gain instead of another product they are trying to sell me. Through this method, you can create a promotional message that is relevant to customers and describes the major aspects from the user’s point of view. Otherwise, weak communication can lead to misleading promotions, wasted time, and missed opportunities to help the product to grow.
Tip: besides sharing your delivery roadmap, also share user feedback. This feedback will help the marketing team relate better to user needs.
That wraps up the 9 areas my experience in product management has taught me to keep in mind throughout the problem-solving process (without forgetting the other main PM sectors — business, UX, and tech). As time passes, I’m eager to discover all the other areas that there are to learn about.
Despite several different areas being covered, there is one thing in common that connects them all together and that would be: communication. I believe it’s one of the universal key factors in product management, regardless of who you’re working for. Through communicating, we find missing pieces, keep our peers informed, and discover obstacles early on before any damage can be done. A product manager should not only hold the product team together but also connect other areas in the organization to the product.
This is why in each section of this article I continually recommend to connect and communicate with other departments, both early and systematically. You want to make sure that everyone has access to accurate information and is up to date about the most important things.
Thanks for reading and I hope it will prove useful to you! Cheers!
