Thinking Out Loud [Product Management] – Page 2 – Learning about product management, out in the open!

What is product management, anyway?

12/02/2023 No Comments

Hiya – I’m Michael, a product manager at the Department for Education. Recently, I’ve been trying to gain more mentoring experience and, as such, I’ve offered to give a talk to university students about product management.

In putting the slides together for this talk, it got me thinking about what the product management role is and what skills I feel you need to be one.

Defining the product role

Obviously, as it is 2023, my first port of call was to ask ChatGPT.

According to the borg, “a product manager is a professional responsible for the development and success of a product or product line. They typically define the product strategy, gather and prioritise product requirements, and work closely with cross-functional teams such as engineering, design, marketing and sales to bring a product to market. The ultimate goal of a product manager is to build products that solve customer problems and deliver value to the business.”

Pretty good to be fair. I then thought I’d see if any leading humans in the space could beat it.

Melissa Perri, the author of ‘Escape the build trap’, tells us “the point of Product Management is to create valuable products that customers love.”

Martin Eriksson, co-founder of Mind the product suggests ‘a product manager’s role is to be the intersection between business, technology and user experience.

Taken from Martin’s article ‘What, exactly, is a product manager?’

Marty Cagan, author of perhaps the most popular product book’s ‘Inspired‘ offers ‘”A product manager’s role is to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”.

Stephanie Leue, Chief Product Officer at Doodle, defines a product manager as someone that has “an insatiable hunger to create a customer journey full of wow-moments”.

And Matt LeMay, who wrote the fantastic ‘Product management in practice’, states “to me, being a product manager is all about being the connective tissue, the glue that connects whatever the different roles are within your organisation.”

This got me thinking, how would I define the role?

My definition of a product manager

I believe the product manager is the person that…

Sets the vision and the strategy to get there
Steers the team’s decision making and aids prioritisation
Provides leadership by creating a culture that allows the team to flourish
Leads on all communication, especially with stakeholders
Represents both the users and the business

Quite a lot, huh?

A good metaphor would be to say the product manager is like the conductor of an orchestra.

The one stood at the front with the full score. They set the tempo and direction for the group and makes sure all the players are in sync without being the main focal point.

Afterall, people aren’t buying tickets to see or hear the conductor yet it will likely to be considered their fault if the music stops or the players are out of tune.

What skills does a product manager needs?

As product management is essentially a job about leading, cajoling, influencing and communicating with lots of people, one of the key things you need are good people skills. For more on this, check out Ken Norton’s excellent article ‘The Art of Product Management’.

However, away from these soft skills I believe there are other key skills a product manager should have or be working to develop.

Communication

This one is such a biggie that I’ve written a whole article on why communication should be every product manager’s top priority.

In it, I outline that the product management role pretty much pivots on how well you can communicate.

Let’s face it, to be successful in product you’ll need to communicate ideas, communicate progress, communicate with your team, communicate with your stakeholders, communicate with your users, communicate verbally, communicate asynchronously, communicate with… you get the picture.

Either way you look at it, being able to keep others informed and having techniques such as storytelling to help with that is a vital tenant of the role.

Decision making

I firmly believe that making a decision, even the wrong one, is always better than making no decision.

That might sound odd but let me explain.

When a team is stuck at a decision point, getting caught in inertia often results in the team entering a moral-zapping phase of analysis paralysis – this can really suck the life out of a team and lead to stagnation.

On the other hand, making a quick decision will either result in you failing fast and being able to swiftly pivot to the right course or even better discovering you made the right choice first time. Win win.

Now let me be clear. Being responsible for decision making doesn’t mean you have to make these decisions in isolation, or that you have to have all the right answers. It just means that its your responsibility, alongside your team, to use the facts at your disposal to pick which option feels best with the best information you have at that point.

Leadership

Although the shape of the team you lead will differ depending on the size of the company you work for, it’s a safe bet that most product roles will see you leading a multidisciplinary team.

What is a multi-disciplinary team?

A team made up of different professions, expertise and viewpoints that commonly include a product manager, a delivery manager, designers, developers and user researchers.

As you can imagine, such a diverse teams needs someone in the middle capable of drawing everyone together, creating a vision of where the product is trying to get to and a plan to get it there.

Being a good leader doesn’t mean you need to dictate everyone’s actions or micromanage.

Quite the opposite.

The best leaders I’ve seen are able to make it clear to their teams what they’re trying to achieve together and then empowering them to navigate the best course to their goal.

Even with a united team, such varied expertise and viewpoints will lead to people getting distracted or having new ideas that pull away from the direction you’ve set. This is where a good product manager is needed to remind people of what they’re trying to achieve together and keep everyone focused on what’s important.

herding-cats — The life of a product manager, herding cats.

Strategy and vision

Quite often a product manager is brought in to help an organisation solve a problem its facing. Or, in some cases, to help the business decide which of all the opportunities or issues ahead of them, is the right one to solve.

These problems, depending on the organisation or sector, could range from issues such as ‘how can we attract more teachers into the profession?’ through to ‘how can we encourage shoppers to add more items to their basket per transaction?’

It’s up to the product manager to help the team define what the future will look like, how the team can build a working solution to solve the problems its chosen to tackle and what the strategy will be to get the team there.

Let’s take eBay, for example. Their vision is ‘To be the world’s leading marketplace’. They decided to get there, they had to make it as easy as possible for sellers to use the platform so as to ensure buyers knew eBay was the best place to go for their needs.

They didn’t have to choose this route. They could’ve focused on attracting more buyers instead, but without a big enough market, this approach would have been likely to fail.

This decision-making process is a good example of the level of strategic thinking good product management requires.

Analysis and performance monitoring

As I’ve mentioned, a product manager is expected to make decisions but that doesn’t mean that you’ll intuitively have the right answers to hand.

That’s why product managers rely on analysing qualititave data such as user feedback or interview answers or looking into the quantitive data gleaned from things such as analytics software. Taking in as much data as possible and using it to inform your decising making process is a real product management superpower.

‘Inspiration exists but it has to find you hard at work’ Pablo Picasso

NYC - MoMA: Pablo Picasso's Three Musicians — Pablo Picasso – The OG of product management strategy, image credit to WallyG

This quite sums up my approach to evidence-based decision making.

I always encourage the teams I’m in to submerge themselves in the information at their disposal.

Then, after going through this process, I find that, seemingly out of nowhere, ideas about different approaches we could take appear. Yet these ideas, I believe, aren’t from out of space, but as a result of the team spending time looking at the evidence and then letting subsequent ideas perculate and emerge from spending time in the data. Conversely, I find these moments of inspiration are rare in teams that don’t give adequate time to considering what the data is telling them.

Away from ideation, data analysis is also vital for monitoring your product’s performance. How can you know if you’re solving the problem if you aren’t measuring performance?

That’s why its vital for the product manager to help the team decide what key performance indicators (KPIs) will best to determine whether your product is performing the way its meant to our whether improvements or adjustments are needed. You also need to ensure that your team has thought about the mechanisms that will be needed to measure your KPIs thus providing you with the data you need to analyse to gain your future data-inspired brainwaves.

Empathy and user focus

Product management often requires skills that are hard to teach, empathy being one of them.

As the product manager is chiefly responsible for representing the voice of the user it is vital that, aided by user research, the product manager has the ability see things from your user’s point of view and use this experience to glean insights into what changes would improve their experience of the product.

Also, having empathy is a vital and much-needed skill for anyone looking to get the most out of a multidisciplinary team.

Leading such a team means you’ll be tasked with creating an environment in which lots of really talents folk with a diverse set of personality types, working styles, expectations and level of understanding will all be looking to you to set the direction

Being an empath, who is adept at caring for a team, listening and being tuned into people’s individual needs will really help you in creating a happy and focused team.

If you’ve enjoyed this article or found it helpful, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter or share it on social media. I’d also love to hear from you so please feel free to reach out. You can normally find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Communication

Why communication should be every product manager’s top priority

05/11/2022 No Comments

Communication is a key skill in many roles but one that is essential to any product manager.

This post will explain why by looking at

Why communication skills are a must-have weapon in any PM’s arsenal
The benefits of good communication and the pitfalls of getting it wrong
Some practical tips product managers can use to improve their communication skills

Why it’s a must for product managers to communicate well

Stakeholders, put simply, are everywhere.

What’s more they either expect to hear from us a lot, or alternatively, they don’t know about us but it’s vital that we get their attention for the benefit of our product.

This is why, whether we like it or not, communication is a key tenant to the product role.

To illustrate this point, I created a quick slide that shows all of the stakeholders I have to manage within my current role. As you can see, there are a lot of them.

Stakeholders I deal with at my role at Department for Education — Some of the stakeholders I have to work with at Department for Education (DfE)

What’s more, each of them have slightly different requirements from you.

Stakeholder groups are rarely alike, each will have their own unique needs owing to factors such as proximity to the work, investment in the success of your product, bandwidth or level of interest or expecation.

This means that often the user groups will require a different story about your product.

Quite often this means that as a product manager you have to tell the same story but in subtly different ways.

Below are examples of some of the stories you may be required to tell.

Stories to tell your team to help them build an amazing product
Stories to the executives and board to justify their investment and prioritisation of your product
Stories to tell the rest of the organisation so you can collaborate and avoid duplication
Stories to customers to inspire them to achieve great things.

Understanding your stakeholders and what kind of narrative they need from you (or more importantly you need to provide for them) requires a lot of thought and attention – not to mention different styles of communication both in terms of style and volume of comms.

Not doing the required level of planning and communicating will lead to you feeling swamped and isolated on your stakeholder-engulfed island.

What’s more, not managing these stakeholders through effective communication will lead to some really negative outcomes for you and your team

The pitfalls of poor communication

The team will start to complain about a lack of direction, poor cohesion and confusion. This will lead to inertia, poor morale and slow progress.

Stakeholders will start getting all up in your grill. Stakeholders, when left in the dark, tend to assume the worst. It’s human nature. This will mean that you can expect to start experiencing a lot of challenge and interference as they,understandably, try to get a handle on what’s going on in your team.

Not communicated with other teams in your org will mean that interdependencies and opportunities will be missed. You may also be duplicating effort by working on the same thing as another team and missing the chance to collaborate.

People don’t care about your product. Not communicating well, building interest and buy-in within your org will mean that nobody is rooting for your product and this isn’t good – especially when there are talks around budget and prioritisation.

Users won’t find your product so there has been no point in all the hardwork This one is really important and something that I’ve sadly seem teams neglect to consider and wonder why user’s aren’t magically flocking to a product that no one has told them about by co-ordinating a marketing plan.

The benefits of getting communication right

Your team feel unified, have a purpose, know what they’re doing and are excited about the task

By communicating little and often with stakeholders you take them on the journey with you, they feel in the loop and assured and on the whole let you get on with things
Mastering cross-team communications will mean that blockers, risks or opportunities can be mitigated for or pounced upon.
It’s easier to share ideas o learn from others. And if I’m honest, what I really mean here is that may well be possible for you to steal ideas and sometimes even code from people that have walked the path before you
You have a comms plans that has ensured your product is being used. Through short feedback loops you can iterate and improve upon each release.

Okay but how can I improve my communications?

“Be the person at the front telling everyone else about the plan”

A person delivering a presentation to an audience — Be on the front foot when it comes to comms

This quote was offered to me by a product manager I was shadowing in my first product role at the Department for Education who told me it was the best piece of product advice he’d ever been given.

I didn’t get it at first but I do now and I agree with him, this advice is probably my go to communications strategy.

For anyone else that is as baffled as I was when I first heard it, let me try to break it down.

This quote isn’t saying that you you need to be the person with all the answers, but if you don’t go to stakeholders with a narrative about your product, other people, normally stakeholders, start shaping it for you.

Therefore, your job is to be on the frontfoot by going out to stakeholders with an outline of your plan. Even if it is incomplete, take it out to stakeholders and let them know what you’re thinking.

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to have the answers, or commit yourself to a plan. You can frame it in a way that says ‘right now, this is our current thinking, what do you think?’

This opens up a space for stakeholders to either feed into your plan, or give you some extra knowledge or things to look into, or, possibly give you their thinking as to why this plan won’t work’.

All of which are good outcomes that, unless you’re on the front foot communicating effectively, you will miss out on.

This approach also also puts stakeholders at ease. They can see and help to shape your thinking. The alternative is that, not feeling they’re the information will start assuming the worst and will enter the space often dictating what they think needs to happen.

If you want to be in charge of your product’s destiny, make sure you’re leading the charge instead of them by communicating well.’

Use storytelling

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.” Steve Jobs — “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

In order to create your product’s narrative, you need to become it’s key storyteller-in-chief.

As this picture shows, without good storytelling, everything is jumbled up, messy, people can make little sense of what you’re trying to tell them.

With good storytelling then everything can seem obvious. I saw a tweet once (which I’d credit if I could remember who by) that said ‘if you get to a point in which stakeholders agree with the approach you’re suggesting because it seems like the most common-sense decision, then you’ve got your storytelling right.”

That really resonated with me. Your job as a product manager is to bring clarity to what can often be really complex problems – a hard task that requires a lot of skill and effort.

What tools can we use to tell better stories about our product?

Create a product vision

A product vision gives your product a purpose – without a purpose there is no story.

Example of a product vision

We make it quicker and easier for academies to belong to a strong trust

So that regional colleagues, teachers and leaders can focus on improving the quality of education — Product vision example

Without sharing the drama the main character (our end users) is facing, the audience (your team / stakehholders) don’t empathize with them enough to go the extra mile and solve their problem. Taking the time to craft an inspiring and clear vision with your team will help you to set out what we’re trying to do, who we’re doing it for, why you’re all bothering to work so hard to do it.

Having a vision will also help you to bring people back on track when your team goes off in tangents as you can use it to remimd people about the shared goal you’re working towards and prevent the team exploring unhelpful territories.

Embrace visual thinking

Explaining your point using visual tools is a key that will open many doors, especially when you’re trying to communicate complex points. Having a chart, diagram, or an artifact like a roadmap can make getting difficult points across so much easier

Here’s an example of a piece of visual thinking I’ve used in the past to help communicate a product strategy within a previous team.

The context doesn’t really matter and as you can see I’m not the world’s greatest artist.

However by simply using shapes, icons and formatting alongside some bold phase names our team was able to effectively convey our strategic approach in a manner that was visually digestible.

Having this simple three step diagram enabled our team to illustrate the path we wished to forge to our senior stakeholders whilst inviting them in to comment on our plan, amend it or add any context we might have. A meaningful conversation was had, one that would have felt waffly and jumbled without a visual asset to focus the conversation around

Plotting your outcomes

This last tip is another one a senior colleague at the DfE shared with me. It’s so simple but effective it feels like a videgame cheat code.

Plan your outcomes

Put short, everyone’s time is precious – so, before every important meeting or call with whatever stakeholder or team mate you’re hoping to influence, you should imagine what the desired outcome is you’d like to arrive at by the end of the interaction.

If you know that you need them to make a decision, help you understand something, or get them to unblock something, knowing what you need from the conversation can help you to prepare in advance to make sure that you can communicate in the most effective way by having a plan for the key points need to hit to drive the conversation where you need it to go.

If you’ve enjoyed this article or found it helpful, please feel free to either comment below, share it on social media or reach out with any thoughts or questions on social media.

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