“It can feel like playing Whac-A-Mole in a beehive, but it’s worth it” — what it means to be a Product Manager at Breast Cancer Care
Product Managers have been around a while now. They are responsible for managing a ‘thing’ that brings value to an organisation and meets the needs of its users. In the Digital world, this could be the checkout of an eCommerce site, the sign up form for an Events platform, or the full website of a small-medium organisation.
But what’s actually involved, and how does it work in a charity setting?
We spoke to the lovely Becca Peters, Product Manager at Breast Cancer Care, to hear about her experiences on user testing, ninjas, and why practicing patience is so important.
What does Product Management mean to you?
To me, being a Product Manager is about being that one person who has an overview of the entire product, a vision for its future and the ability to channel day-to-day digital towards achieving that goal.
This isn’t always easy, there are certainly times it can feel like playing Whac-A-Mole in a beehive, but it’s worth it, because we’re here to provide the best digital experiences we can for our users.
How do great Product Managers act?
I try to stay out of the limelight as much as possible in my role. I like the ninja-style method of influence and find this approach buys me the space and time to work on the really meaningful collaboration I need to get results quickly. I think the faster you fail the faster you learn, and from there you’re in an excellent position to keep working and testing to make your product better and better.
This way of operating means I need a strong team behind me and I’ve always been incredibly lucky in that regard, working with smart, passionate and productive people who keep me on my toes, challenge me and inspire me in equal measure to get the job done.
What books, blogs, events or other content to you use to keep up to date?
The best book I’ve read over the last few years was Learning Agile by Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene. It really helped me as I started to specialise in the product side of digital and formed a great basis for me to train others in my teams.
More recently I enjoyed The Practitioners Guide to Product Management by Jock Busuttil, it had some great anecdotal elements that stuck in my mind a long time after I finished.
Day-to-day I check Medium and Twitter, following a lot of prolific product bloggers. I’m always looking for ideas and solutions to problems, it’s great to see what others are up to in the field.
What kind of problems do you think that Product Managers are particularly well placed to solve in the charity sector?
I think Product Managers are in a great position to look at the long-term thorny issues that are slowing an organisation down or impacting on user experience. Instead of working on delivering to a limited scope, we often get the chance to focus on the whole package and make strategic decisions that contribute to a better long-term product overall.
One example I’ve had in my current role at Breast Cancer Care is working on a solution to our microsite culture. Like most charities, we have a demanding cycle of campaign, service and fundraising delivery and being a big organisation, we often think about each of these activities as stand-alone rather than as part of a wider picture. When I first started in the role, I noticed this dichotomy playing out on our website, with lots of isolated microsites divorced from their overall context. While part of the solution lay in reassuring teams that reconsidering this approach would yield better results, another part lay in addressing the capability of the website to provide a positive solution for content creators.
Working with William Joseph we’ve been able to develop an entirely flexible, module-based campaign content type, which effectively works as an easily customisable campaign template within our standard navigational structure. This work has made a huge difference to the user experience as well as considerably cutting down the amount of internal work involved in achieving campaign readiness digitally within the organisation.
What soft skills are you currently trying to develop?
This is a good question! I really admire our digital analyst for the way she’s able to make people feel totally comfortable while she subtly changes everything they do. Being a classic INTJ I’m aware of my tendency to be annoyingly rational and I can get frustrated when I feel like there may be non-logic-driven factors at play. I’ve had great opportunities to work on this over the last few years and often having that patience has resulted in a better overall outcome.
What’s the best thing about your job?
I love building things. I think Product Management is the perfect mix of creativity and logic, so the role suits me really well. I particularly enjoy the sprint process of seeing ideas and prototypes come to life, especially as a result of user testing, when you know the difference you could make with the work you’ve produced.
What’s the worst thing about your job?
I suppose a very familiar challenge for many people working in the charity sector is being able to clearly see the solution ahead of you but not having the money or manpower to achieve it. That can be difficult, particularly when your options tend to be ignoring a problem or spending a lot of time and energy working around it.
I think there are things everyone can do in these situations, though. I’ve had recent success expanding the scope of an existing project and offering to deliver the bits that are relevant to me. This means a project is more developed overall and the original team get more hands on deck!
What’s the most surprising thing you’ve seen in user testing at Breast Cancer Care?
User testing is another favourite aspect to my role and however many times I do it, people always surprise me.
Part of my role at Breast Cancer Care involves developing a peer support forum, which currently has around 100,000 users. When I started in the role, I made an assumption that our users would appreciate us drawing out the community element of the platform; perhaps a homepage welcome video, and some photos and quotes from engaged members welcoming new visitors to the Forum.
In fact, weeks of workshops and individual user testing taught me that I couldn’t have been more wrong; our users, as a general rule, expressed feeling both vulnerable and terrified when they ventured onto the Forum following a breast cancer diagnosis. They told us how the last thing they wanted was to interact with anyone and risk feeling like a member of a club they’d give anything not to be part of, or to risk hearing about a devastating outcome for someone on a similar treatment plan. Instead, engagement came much later in the journey for them, on their terms and in their own time. It wasn’t something they wanted to be presented with upfront in the way I had imagined and this made me think quite differently about some upcoming development work we’re undertaking on the Forum.
Who are your Product Manager heroes?
She’s not technically a product hero but I’m a huge fan of Lindsay Herbert, the Digital Lead at IBM. I’ve seen her speak several times and I’m planning to take her book on holiday with me next month!
William Joseph have been working with Breast Cancer Care to produce bespoke templates, delivering a refreshed user experience and design for key fundraising pages across the Breast Cancer Care website.
