Product Management and creating change…
A big part of the product role is to create change, whether it’s in the habits our users, or how value is perceived / generated / captured, or how important our product is in solving problems for them. This gets talked about a lot.
What doesn’t get highlighted as much (in my opinion), is that in order to successfully create the change we want to see, we also need to be great at managing change, both internally and externally. What do I mean by this? Let me give an example for both internal and external change.
Imagine that internally, there is an effort for the organisation to change from being sales driven to be more product driven. Half the battle is in the mechanisms that enable conversions, upsells, and stickiness to be done when users are using the product. The other half is working well with the marketing teams on how we can better release this, or working with the sales teams so that it is clear that being product driven does not mean we do not need our sales peers.
For external change, imagine that a product has made major changes to their platform landing page, and there is no effort to help users manage the on-boarding of these changes either through guides, videos or communications to the user.
In both examples, will change still happen? Yes. But also in both examples, could change have been managed better which potentially would have resulted in bigger impact? I don’t know about you, but it’s a yes for me.
Don’t just create change. Manage it.
