The Secret to Building Successful Products Is Not What You Think

I couldn’t do it anymore. Frustrated by going around in circles, I quit my dream job. Although it’s not what I set out to do, it took me eight years to accumulate enough business and technology experience to become a product manager.

The field of product management faces countless challenges on multiple fronts. There are the human challenges of hiring or getting into product management, communication challenges with the various stakeholder groups, and the challenge of gaining product adoption. Aside from the human challenges, there are the technical and business challenges of producing viable and feasible products.

Product Management is a fairly new field with many different ways to practice. Large companies such as Amazon might have a product manager dedicated to a single button, while a startup may have a product manager dedicated to defining the requirements for an entire product that doesn’t yet exist. The job duties of product managers can also be made ambiguous when teams combine it with project management or Scrum Product Owner duties.

There are also challenges inherent in the job itself, managing key business stakeholder requests, communicating and coordinating with developers and designers, and most importantly understanding the users’ needs. It’s not uncommon to hear stories of the tension between a product manager and the development team lead, or maneuvering through stakeholder feedback with designers. Sometimes resentment and feelings of contempt come into play. Product managers need to manage these communication challenges all while trying to achieve a product vision, validate the unique value proposition, and create a path to monetization.

Lastly, gaining product adoption is immensely challenging and can be compounded by navigating the common practice of build-it-and-they-will-come. Teams often focus heavily on outputs, pushing lines of code, over outcomes, having a valuable impact. Placing the primary focus on the product or feature and not on learning from users, leads to building products and features that don’t get enough or sometimes any users.

So what’s the solution? Because the landscape is constantly evolving, product managers need to be constantly learning and keeping up with the latest best practices. Why reinvent the wheel when you can learn from others who have overcome similar challenges in more effective ways? More important than learning, however, is choosing kindness over ego. Don’t pretend you have the answers because you don’t, and you can’t because everything is an experiment. Instead, wonder and ask, why? Work to really understand the users’ needs. Listen to all stakeholders through a lens of curiosity, and respond with compassion and grace.

To illustrate these points I’d like to share a few stories from my experiences with business stakeholders, engineers, and users. I was working at a startup that was new to building web applications. When I tried to implement processes from my past experience, I failed to realize how novel product management frameworks are. I received a lot of push back from the team. Instead of being kind and curious, I let my ego take over. I thought I was being helpful by trying to educate the team on product management frameworks. What I didn’t realize was my background in business-to-consumer applications and internal tools uses a different approach than what was needed to build a business-to-business (B2B) application. Common challenges in the B2B space are building products where payers aren’t the users and building products that demo well to get the contract. Demo products don’t always translate into products that get adopted and have continuous use. Both of which are essential to product viability.

In hindsight, had I gotten curious and practiced kindness I might have discovered a way to work within their constraints to produce something that accomplished the goal of getting sales and product adoption. Kindness would have enabled me to be humble and examine my blind spots. Most importantly, it might have helped me to earn the trust of the team so that we could all work better together.

With engineers, product managers without a technical background can find it challenging working with them as their expectations of a product manager’s role might not align with what’s required. It’s also common for engineers to want a product manager to prove themselves or to earn their trust. Kindness helps in this case too as healthy teams ideally default to trust.

There was one instance that I sensed the lead engineer was annoyed with me. He wouldn’t respond to my emails or Slack messages. In meetings he would be short with me, and I would catch a couple of his eye rolls when I spoke. I called a meeting with him to specifically discuss our communication challenges. It was an uncomfortable conversation that was made easier by getting curious and responding with compassion and grace.

I eventually learned that he assumed I knew how to perform the duties of a Product Owner. In the past he had worked with product managers who had a hybrid product owner role. I explained to him that I had never performed those tasks before, and we shared with each other our backgrounds and experience. He asked if I wanted to learn and suggested we implement Scrum together. I wouldn’t have gained the understanding of his misperception of my experience had I not taken the kind approach and gotten curious. An added bonus is now I have Scrum experience.

Regarding kindness and the customer, creating a continuous feedback loop is important. In many cases you will need a pool of users you can tap into to help inform your design decisions. Being kind and curious can help with gaining and maintaining participation.

There was a product where I had our alpha testers sign up to participate in sort of a cohort style where for a month we had weekly onsite meetings as a group. There was a particular participant who was skeptical of the product and was vocal about it. While I encourage skeptics, his frequent and verbose comments could have potentially put the test at risk by heavily influencing the group. On one of our breaks I sought him out to chat with him to see if I could uncover the underlying issue. Through kind curiosity I learned he had recently gotten a job with a competitor. I asked him if he thought it was fair for him to continue participating. Surprised, he said he actually thought the product was pretty cool and wanted to continue. He was a more honest participant going forward.

Although I quit my dream job I didn’t quit my dream career. I’ve been learning about how to ask better questions out of genuine curiosity and how to ask questions with the kindness attributes of compassion and grace. I’ve asked questions of myself wondering how I can do and be better. Through getting curious with kindness I was able to realize my part in my failure to succeed at my dream job.

Questions are powerful and can help you and your team get unstuck. Questions can help you grow in your professional and personal development. However, the art of question asking also requires study. As Hal Gregersen profoundly states in his book Questions Are the Answer,

“Many people arrive at the right question to guide their daily actions only after they are struck by the sudden awareness of being guided by the wrong one.”

With proactive questioning you can ask yourself what your blind spots are which will naturally lead to learning product management best practices and how to communicate better with others. Start learning, keep learning. Share your experiences and insights. Most of all, keep that ego in check and be kind and curious.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my kindness product philosophy. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please feel free to comment or reach out to me on Twitter.

This was an assignment for the Praxis Product Leadership Development program. If you’re interested in learning more about my experience in the program, you know where to find me.