30 Days of Product Management Genius with Carlos Gonzalez De Villaumbrosia | 10 Weekly Habits of Successful Product Managers
“What’s your long-term career goal?” the CEO asked.
“I don’t have a long-term goal, yet.” I was answering a question in the final interview for a Product position. “But I have one for the short-term: become a Product Manager.”
“Okay. We’ll see,” he replied, ending the interview. Three days later, I landed the job. I was going to facilitate a product powered by cutting-edge technology that I barely knew. Besides being in over my head with the technology, I didn’t even know what I was supposed to do as a Product Manager!
I didn’t know how to achieve my goal: I didn’t just want to survive as a Product Manager, I wanted to thrive! I was nervous, but my desire to learn helped me focus on my next steps. I hired a researcher to provide me with all the information and online tutorials I needed to learn about Product Management, and I acquired a list of thought leaders in this domain.
A week later, I was like a piranha swimming in the ocean of knowledge. Tapping into all the genius of those who came before me, soaking up all of their combined wisdom, I quickly learned as much as I could and applied this to my new job. Senior Management was amazed by my acumen and Product Management skills.
Carlos Gonzalez De Villaumbrosia, Founder and CEO at Product School, is a Product Management genius who contributed to my PM success.
10 Weekly Habits of Successful Product Managers
I’m a huge fan of building habits to help achieve my goals. I found this De Villaumbrosia post 10 Weekly Habits of Product Managers that Make a Big Difference on Product School’s website, and saw some great ideas. Here are the weekly habits he recommends:
Spend time with your team
The people you work with are like a family that support each other. You wouldn’t have this kind of relationship unless you spend time with them. You want to build a great product, and they’re the driving force of the product development. You’ll begin to understand their challenges and frustrations, but also learn about their personal and professional priorities. When people see that you are invested in them, they tend to invest in you and the things you have in common, like your product!
Spend time with your customers
As the Product Owner, I need to understand the problem space for my customers, which helps me determine their solution space. I scheduled appointments with customers and asked them about their needs, how they use our products, and how we can improve them. Based on these visits, I created a customer persona and presented this to the Senior Manager. I parlayed customer visits into more customers visits.
Spend time with your product
My product was a backend control panel with a web interface. I met with and questioned the people who knew the product’s design and purpose, and as many production and business stakeholders I could connect with. I wanted to know the past, present and future of my product, and be a legitimate product owner, and make my product and my company perform even better!
Read
As a product manager, you’re in the intersection of technology, user experience and business. Product management is about juggling design, code, marketing, competitors, trends and technology. Staying competitive means you need to constantly stay on top of all of these topics.
To get started in this field, check out the 2017 list of online & offline resources to become a product manager and listen to the 24 Product Management Podcasts While Learning On the Move.
Hang out with an engineer
Your engineers support your product, and no matter how much you think you might know about your product, the engineers probably know more, at least when it comes to the form and function of your product. Tell your engineers what your customers have told you. Keep them in the loop. They may have a simple solution to a problem you thought enormous. Or they may need to explain to you that your simple enhancement idea would cause countless issues to arise.
Say no
I tend to say yes too often, and sometimes my willingness to assist reduces my overall delivery capacity, as each of us only carries just so much bandwidth. Product managers need to be single-minded on their product, most of the time. No one person can satisfy everyone else’s desires.
Listen
Your product is laden with stakeholders. Designers, engineers, marketers, customers, executives. Meetings and one on one conversations take up probably two-thirds of my time. I speak some, but I always encourage feedback and I listen. I don’t want to miss a detail. I don’t want to overlook a flaw. And I don’t want a stakeholder to feel I have failed to invest in the end-result we all desire.
Take a walk and think
Working and investing all of your thoughts and energy in your product, day in and day out, you can quickly be buried in the tactical level of execution and forget about the strategy and vision for the product. To align them, sometimes you need to take a step back. Walking outside and looking at the sky is a symbolic gesture to shift your mental focus and think about the big picture.
Master note-taking and review
My messy notes on designing the topology for my product:
On average, I attend 10 or so meetings each week. I can’t possibly remember everything, from execution details, marketing trends, innovative ideas, etc. Every morning I review the notes I wrote the previous day, and I’m often surprised at some of the items I’d written down. Ironically, those items sometimes provide the best ideas later on.
The product team is often the only cross-functional unit within a company that weaves all the information together to nurture the product. It could be discovering a new product idea, monitoring the product development process, researching a new feature. Never allow something special to be missed or forgotten simply because you didn’t take notes.
Give credit
I particularly like this last habit, and I want to reference another post — Inside The Mind of A Product Manager — from the Product School to take this one step further.
As product managers, 100% of our focus is on the product’s success. We are involved in many different processes in the product lifecycle, but we’re never solely responsible for any one area. Much of the time, I feel more like a movie director than an actor. I point and wave and ask people to say it louder, or do it again, or just cut! But in the end, the actors need credit for their amazing performances, no matter how much work we did behind the camera.
So whenever there is a great test case written, I give credit to the test team; when there is a great performance enhancement in the system, I give credit to the development team; when there is a great feature implemented, and great feedback is received from a customer, I give credit to the customer.
You can’t create a great product without a great foundation. Ultimately, you should give the credit to the company you’re working at. Many came before you so that you could excel at what you do!
Are you a Product Manager? Are you hungry for more practical and actionable PM knowledge you can apply on your job?
Carlos Gonzalez De Villaumbrosa is the closing keynote speaker in the Product Manager Summit: The first FREE Web Conference showcasing Product Management best practices from around the world.
In his session, he will discuss How to Become a Great Product Manager.
You don’t want to miss this. Claim your free ticket.
