Awesome Productclub

Five things all Product Managers should know

While working as a PM over the past 7 years, I learned these five important things for all Product Managers:

1. Know your customers

This is product management 101. Every product management literature will tell you you must know who your customers are. What are their problems? What are their needs? What traits and attributes do they have? What do they like / dislike about your product? You must understand the customer problems so you can design and build products to meet their needs. Knowing your customers is an ongoing process. It is important for Product Managers to regularly listen and talk to your customers who will share A LOT of valuable information on how to improve your product and tap into new opportunities. In addition to the qualitative insights, you can also analyse quantitative data to understand the product metrics and customer behaviour. Sometimes there may be discrepancies between what customers tell you vs how they are actually using the product so it’s important to know both. For example, when customers tell you they like your product but you can see from the data that they are not using the product regularly. Perhaps the product isn't easy to use? Or they are not telling you the truth? Once you know your customers, you'll be able to shape your product roadmap to build the product they want!

2. Know your industry

A deep understanding of your industry is one of the qualities that makes the Product Managers an expert

in their role. Product Managers without the industry knowledge is like steering a ship without knowing the weather conditions. When you're steering a ship, you need to know the current weather conditions AND the weather forecast so you can determine the best route for your ship and prepare for any wild rides. Otherwise you won't be prepared to avoid the storm or at worst case, your ship will sink! As a product manager, this means you need to know your playing field - both current environment and the outlook into the future. You need to know who your key competitors are and their offering, industry regulations & compliance requirements, industry trends and any upcoming changes. For example, if your product is in the consumer lending space, it’s an advantage for you to know the innovative trends in the fintech lending space and any upcoming regulatory changes the will impact you product. Combining your customer and the industry knowledge will help you craft the product positioning and value propositions to reach product market fit.

3. Know your numbers

This is what sets apart Product Owners from Product Managers - Product Owners are often delivery focused with great technical skills in scrum. While Product Managers have the delivery skills, they are have commercial sense. Product Managers tend to have business acumen and understand the importance of driving customer impact while optimising business impact. They focus on setting outcome based metrics rather than output based. For example, metrics such as conversion rates and recurring annual revenue drive successful business outcomes whereas performance based metrics such as number of features shipped, time to launch measure output and doesn't necessarily indicate you are delivering features or products that have impact. Once the metrics are set, the ongoing monitoring of the numbers is critical. If your conversion metric is performing lower than target, you might want to analyse the funnel and optimise onboarding. This sounds like a no brainer but I've seen this Product Manager to make decisions that will improve the product performance and business outcomes.

For example, if the business has a product conversion target of 70% and the product is only achieving 50%, a Product Manager may decide to review the onboarding process to improve the UX which may improve the conversion rate.

4. Know how to tell a story:

Often great a Product Manager is a great story teller. Product Managers spend a lot of time talking to various stakeholders across the business including the senior executives. Product Managers must be able to influence the key stakeholders to get your buy-in, sponsor an initiative, endorse a product roadmap etc. If

you know your customers, industry and numbers, the chances are your product roadmap is on the right track but sometimes this is not enough. Just because you know what you are doing, it doesn’t mean everyone else will agree with you. It is important for a Product Manager to be able to tell a story about their product vision, value proposition and roadmap. In addition to this, you also need to be able to change the angle of your story based on who you are talking to. If you’re talking to a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for a funding approval, you may want to focus on the numbers when you’re telling your story. If you’re talking to a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) for endorsement for your roadmap, you may want to focus on customer experience and acquisition when telling the same story.

5. Know how to tell a story:

In my experience, prioritisation is the hardest task for a Product Manager because there are no black and white guidelines, yet it is critical that the roadmap is prioritised appropriately to avoid poor product performance, customer dissatisfaction and development inefficiencies. So how do you prioritise effectively? Generally, anything that relates to the regulatory and compliance requirements are prioritised over everything else if it causes your product to be in breach of the law. Then there are critical bugs that impact

large number of existing customers. Now this is where it gets tricky. How do you prioritise between a list of feature enhancements that customers have been asking for vs brand new features that will make the product sexy vs tech debts vs other non-critical bugs vs chores – just to name a few. We all know if we had unlimited resources, we will do everything at the same time but this is often not the case. Many product teams have limited resources and prioritisation is important. what I have used in the past is – sticking to the key product / business metrics. If you prioritise features that help you achieve your metrics, provided that your metrics is set out for success, you are on the right track.

Product Management is a complex field. It is definitely not a skill that you can learn from a university degree. It take practice and learning on the job. From my experience, if you know the five things I’ve outlined above, I think you are on the right track to be a successful Product Manager.

Julia the product gal

August 2020