7 ways to prematurely kill your PM career
Let’s go through some of the common mistakes made by Product Managers. The best way to commit professional harakiri is to follow these steps :
1. Make a product with just yourself in mind
It’s natural to try and make a product that you like and think about how you would like a feature to pan out or add value. However, this adds a lot of bias to your thinking, and you might end up making something that you love, but your customer can’t use. As far as possible, depend on data while taking decisions (better for B2C products). In the absence of data, talk directly to your users constantly (imperative for B2B products). Don’t let your intuition drive you — use reasoning to shape your product.
2. Misunderstand what the “real MVP” is
Ask questions to your clients constantly to try and understand why they are asking for a certain feature/product, and iteratively build stuff that directly serves that requirement. This will keep your client happy, as you are delivering a usable solution quicker, and keep them engaged with feedback as well.
Eg. If your client asks for a car, figure out why they want it. If their main purpose is to go from A to B, build a cycle. If their main purpose is to transport 4 passengers, give them a horse cart. Figurative example, go for the meaning. Here is an essay from the man behind this concept — It’s an amazing read. http://blog.crisp.se/2016/01/25/henrikkniberg/making-sense-of-mvp
3. Dilly dally between building an MVP or a Scalable Product
Not every product/feature needs to be able to handle a trillion users on launch. Have a holistic understanding of the company, roadmap, requirements, runway, client situation, product portfolio etc, and accordingly either build an MVP quickly, or take a little longer and build a scalable product. Most of the time, specially in B2B, your customers will ask for 100 things, out of which ~80 will be used less than 5 times and discarded, 10 will be used once a month, 5 will be used once a week, and 5 will be used daily (representative numbers — they depend on your stage and your client’s comfort with your team. The takeaway is that only a few features will be used regularly). Your company will generally be built around the last 2 types. Focus on getting to them quickly.
4. Hate the processes which were set up to benefit you
Product Management has become extremely structured and process driven via the advent of multiple tools like JIRA, Spec Docs, Slack etc. Unfortunately, humans have a tendency to become lazy/rebellious, and either stop following the processes, or treat them as a burden and not actually utliize them for their true worth. These process help you learn task estimation, relative priortization, timeline management and you must keep an eye on these metrics and terms for your own long term learning.
5. Misunderstand when to break/follow your process
A lot of inbound requests hit the product team and they are varied in nature and ask. Sales and Clients will present every request as mission critical (human nature, sorry about that). If you prioritise every new request, you will fall behind on your product roadmap. If you reject every request, you will lose your clients. As a product manager you should have a sense of relative prioritisation to slot them properly, while managing the stakeholders effectively. If a request is truly mission critical, you will need to break your process, and you should do it for the greater good of the company.
6. Take communication for granted
As a PM, you are the centre of all the communication, and hence should keep constant touch with the Sales Team, Client, Tech Team, Design, Business etc, and leverage all the process and documents possible, such as Product Specs, FAQs, Feedback forms etc. Do not assume people have understood — ask them questions to ensure that they have. Provide well written, thorough documents, and ensure that people actually read them.
7. Think that you know it all, and stop learning
Always keep your eyes, ears, and any other sensors open, to keep learning about your product, the feedback to your product, your clients, the market etc. The best PMs are not Ivy League grads, but those that have the ability to absorb tremendous information/feedback coming from users, developers, designers and various disparate data sources, process that information and make the whole process and product better. Efficiency of product delivery improves when a hundred things fall in place. A caveat here — not all feedback/data sources are to be treated equally. Over time, you need to assign a value to each of the sources, and ensure that you give each piece of feedback the weight it deserves.
Agree? Disagree? Clap? Slap?Let us know what you feel in the comments, and do tell us what topics we should cover next.
— Prateek & Pritam
