The 8 Product Manager Aspects
Product people are business people, first and foremost. They work across functions and serve to integrate or synchronize the work of others so that products and portfolios can be planned, developed, launched and managed.
- Steven Haines
Introduction
So here we go, after a 7-year journey in product management in various roles and industries, and also facing problems, challenges, and disappointments, which made me learn and retrospect myself to become better in my role as a Product Manager.
In this article, I want to share based on my experience what I believe are the aspects that I improve from time to time to ensure what I’m working on as a Product Manager can be more effective that will delivering a product that has a positive impact for both user and also the business.
Let’s get started with the first one
The Aspects
- Prioritization
There’s a reason behind why I put this in the first one, I would say the difference between a “Good Product Manager” and a “Great Product Manager” is how to prioritize something.
In this situation of tech winter, there is no luxury of time for every company, so creating an excellent prioritization for every initiative that will effectively impact the user and the business will be needed for every Product Manager. I know how to prioritize every initiative It’s not as easy as it sounds, it needs a lot of experience and also the best approaches to make sure you’re firm with the prioritization you made.
The two things I personally would do to be more firm in knowing which initiative to be prioritized is cracking the unclear problems to be clear and also unclear solutions to be clear, There are a lot of frameworks and approaches to crack it, finding and learning to do it. And after you crack it you always can quantify the impact on the user and also the business, with this approach, I can articulate the answer to 5W1H questions smoothly for every decided initiative and the confidence level of prioritization that is being made will be automatically increased.
2. Define Target Metrics
When you’re in the hiring process as a Product Manager, the common question in user interviews is about how you define the target metrics regarding the product study case given, matter is an on-site or take-home test. It’s to get to know if you are a Product Manager who knows how the product you deliver is having the right impact on the user and also contributes to the business.
For example, if you are creating a product for food delivery online, what kind of measurement that you use to know that the product giving the user the right value? Are there any other metrics that are important to be monitored? how much expected business contribution in the specific time frame when the product first launched? always remember if you join a company you need to have a mindset that it is a company and not a foundation, so the business metric which most of the company is revenue becomes clearly the main target metric for the sustainability of the company itself.
It’s very important for a Product Manager to define the right target metrics, The right way to define it can be by calculating the market sizing, checking existing products available on the market from the conventional ones, or even checking from the top product alternatives out there, and if your product already being launch you can always checking the performance from product analytics based on the previous periods, then create a wise number of prediction of target metrics from it and giving out all you got to achieve it.
3. Product Sense
From my perspective, product sense is like an intuition for the best decision-making regarding your product, It matters in the pre-development phase, ongoing development phase, or even post-development phase. In fact, the ability to have more good product sense can be gained from by experience of developing a product time over time but I would say you can also gain it when you have traits regarding “Curiosity” that I will share in the next section.
For example, in the pre-development phase, the product sense will contribute when you can make a decision regarding which user experience or interface that good for the specific type of product you want to develop, or the other example, there was a time when I needed to develop a product that has a high sensitivity because the product has a feature for money movement so it had a potential issue that will be facing for the customer or the internal business, since I’ve been experienced to know about pre-mortems method, I conduct this method with all stakeholders to prevent any problems that will come when the product launch and how to mitigate every problems. Doing this helps me create a better product experience for users and also a better operation on the internal team to unblock any challenges when the product is being launched in the post-development phase.
4. Curiosity
Learn and get to know everything that is not limited to what you working on as a Product Manager. The knowledge itself doesn’t mean always being in the product management area, you can learn also about what trends nowadays on social media, what the stock market doing today, and even the updated things that are being discussed by people a lot like transportation or weather conditions. Fulfilling this kind of knowledge can be useful for you someday in your product decision, influencing other stakeholders, or even when you move to another company in the industry related to the information knowledge you already learned about.
Talking about the industry, I would say product management is not only about how to develop the product but also about knowing the industry of the product itself. For example, suppose you’re in the financial industry. In that case, you must know how the product you are developing will comply with the regulations, or when you’re in the education industry, you should know about the principles of Pedagogy and Andragogy to make sure you can create a suitable product with your targeted user.
Curious to find out about anything will be great fuel as a Product Manager, One method I love to fulfill my curiosity is to download any app in the store (there are 1000+ apps downloaded on my phone currently) and try it to know exactly how product giving value to me as a user. With this method, I can know how the user experiences for specific type of product, technology that can be implemented within the product, and many more.
And remember to always ask about everything, to make sure all kinds of information that you need for the sake of the product development process will be seamless and the product you deliver can be effective.
There is no stupid question, stupid people don't ask question.
5. Writing
There are two basic soft skills that are important to have as a Product Manager first is communication skill and the other is writing skill, By default you as a Product Manager need to manage how you communicate with other stakeholders but writing skill is also part of communication skill to be have on it.
Imagine when you are creating PRD but everyone who reads it does not understand well what you wrote on PRD, Of course, it will have a bad impact on your product development because the content on the PRD misleads people, so how do make sure what you wrote can communicate well to everyone who reads it become very important. I would say every single PM has their own style of writing and template for their PRD, Focus on what you wrote so can be understandable to be consume to read by tech or non-tech stakeholders.
Also as a Product Manager, there are a lot of documents that you will need to write, and the document you create to write on will also impact the process of product development, In my previous company we decided to implement a Working Backward approach from Amazon to create a PR-FAQ document. By creating this document, all stakeholders have a common understanding of the idea before starting the development phase. Based on my experience, creating a PR-FAQ is one of the best practices for how to improve my writing skills. Also creating a Medium article is my personal way to improve how I can write well for you as my reader.
6. Influence
Communication plays a big role in how effectively you can influence others, if you have the perfect knowledge regarding your initiative but you can’t communicate it well then others will hard to get the overall context and agree with what you share with them. I would say how to influence others becomes one of the strengths I personally believe I can do well as a Product Manager (this is also a reason why I decided to become a Product Manager). Since my first career, I have seen myself as a social person and I really love to gain chemistry with other stakeholders for working or non-working related because I believe when you have good chemistry with another person then the working process between you two should become more seamless and enjoyable.
One of the best approaches to effectively influence others that I always implement is called Nemawashi. Nemawashi is a Japanese approach where you talk to people informally, get their input, and address concerns before formally proposing an idea or making a decision, all to make sure everyone’s on board.
It seems not as easy as it sounds to process this approach, it depends back to your stakeholders, department, and the culture of the company itself, but implementing Nemawashi helps me a lot to influence others and make decisions based on inputs and agreement from every stakeholder to make sure you can execute your product initiative seamlessly.
7. Understanding Tools & Framework
Product tools are like your weapon to make sure you can utilize the specific weapon in a specific situation, For a Growth Product Manager the product analytic tool is the main weapon for analyzing user behavior and interactions within the product, I would say when there is no specific product analytic you can use then you just instantly become a blind product person because you don’t have an insight regarding the user to make sure you can effectively take an action item based on the user behavior data.
Navigate every tool that you depend on to use is very important to make sure you can do the working process as a Product Manager very well, Spare your time to explore the tools and find out what feature on the specific tool can be useful for your working process and if you are using the third party tool that has a specific account manager for you then it’s a good thing because you can ask them as a consultant to guide you and share what are your use-cases to make sure the tool that you use can be utilized comprehensively. If you are a product management enthusiast who wants to start a career as a Product Manager I would say the first thing you can start is to explore a demo of product analytic tools like Amplitude and see how this tool can help you monitor your adoption of users in your product.
And for product framework, there are a lot of frameworks out there like RICE, Kano Model, Double Diamond, and many more, Based on my experience you should not make it very strict using the detail of what to do on the framework, instead making the framework controls us we are the one who controls the framework, customize the framework you see as a good approach to be used and make it suitable with the culture of the product team itself so it can be more effective for your product development process. Exploring the purpose and then implementing the frameworks will contribute to your productivity, confidence level, and of course, how great the product you deliver is.
8. Monitor Performance
One thing is for sure when you create a product you want to give the product the right value for the user and also the business, so obsessing over the metrics for both user metrics and business metrics should be needed as a Product Manager to check the performance to know is it giving the right value or not.
From what I saw, there are a lot of entry-level PMs that focus only on development and shipping the products, moving from one initiative to another initiative but forgetting to check the performance of the previous initiative, because as Product Manager the difference with the Project Manager from my personal perspective is when a Project Manager focused on shipping the initiative using the cycle Plan and Execute, while the Product Manager is focused on cycle to Plan, Execute, Monitor, and Iterate.
The most cases happening as PM we will be asked about the product performance by our direct report, stakeholders, or even CEO, When we are already obsessed with always checking the performance we can articulate clearly to them regarding the performance of the product not just based on an assumption.
