While the definition of a product manager is still murky in the industry and greatly varies from company to company, I often get this question – “how can I be a better product manager”. It’s a good thing to ask. As we should always be striving to be better at what we do and always look at ways on how we can improve ourselves.
While I won’t be covering everything in this blog post, there are some fundamentals that you should be aware of and even master, regardless of the industry you are in. After all, you don’t want to be just a good product manager – you want to be a great product manager. Go big or go home!
First, let’s cover the basics:
The Fundamentals:
Every building needs a strong foundation. So does every product manager. Whether you learn over time by doing it with trial and error or whether you are just a natural-born rockstar, you need to get the basic aspects of product management nailed down. For example, I did an MBA to learn the basics, but even then hands-on experience and many mistakes enabled me to get the basics right. I’m sure you are brighter than I am and will get there much quicker.
Let’s list the absolute minimum that you need to properly do:
Market Assessment:
Market analysis or market assessment is both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the market your product(s) or your company is serving. You investigate the size of the market both in volume and in value, the various customer segments you are serving, and the buying patterns of your customers, as well as the competition, and the economic environment in terms of barriers to entry and the regulations that vendors and customers need to adhere to.
Needless to say, (why am I saying it if it’s needless?) this is the starting point before you do anything else. You need to understand the market, what your customers are trying to do, and the competitive landscape. Do not skip this step.
Translating business requirements to technical specs
As a product manager, your role is to translate the business requirements of end-users into a product plan that makes sense to both the business you are operating and the engineering or technical side that will deliver the product or the features. You exist between the two teams and therefore you need to be bi-lingual.
For example, if your customers are asking for better security of better analytics it isn’t a good idea to have your engineers dive head-first into developing a security or analytics solution without knowing your users’ requirements first. How will the users leverage the product? What problem are they trying to solve. Are their problems the same for public cloud and private cloud (on premise data center).
You don’t want your product to miss the mark, and that’s where the PM’s translation skills come in and are very important to ensure the success of the product.
Roadmap Planning, Feature Prioritization, And Resource Allocation
Ah yes… the fun begins. If only you had all the resources in the world. If only engineering could deliver all the features that you wanted when you wanted. Why oh why can they just not do that. Because, whether you are in a startup or a legacy large company resources and particularly engineering resources will always be constrained.
If you were at a startup and are used to delivering products with only 10 engineers and then you joined a large company and now you have 50 engineers, I guarantee you, you will still feel resource constrained even though you have 5 times the resources than you used. It’s the law I would like to call “all the engineers are always going to be busy with other shit”. 🙂
Given that you don’t have an infinite number of engineers, you are going to figure out which features are high priority and which ones can be implemented later or never. You will have to do this by understanding how long each feature will take, what are the compromises engineering will have to make to meet the requirements and whether this will still meet the customer requirements and also whether the customer is willing to pay the value that you put on that feature or product. As you can imagine, this means lengthy discussions with engineering, sales, and the customer.
You as the product manager are at the center and you will need to figure out what that perfect decision is for the business and add shareholder value to the company you are working for. Typically, in the form of revenue!
Product Pricing
How much should you charge for the product? Your engineers worked very hard, you had to spend marketing dollars to promote the product and you had to train your sales force and maybe the channel (resellers, distributors, system integrators) so that they can sell and convey the value prop.
While you may feel like it’s your precious baby what is the customer willing to pay and what is the market willing to bear? Did you spend more time and effort than a discount cash flow or net present value values your product in today’s dollars.
Do you sell your product as a perpetual good? Maybe you should try the Netflix model of subscription based? Yes, even hardware products can be sold on a subscription basis. Regardless of the method, you better make sure that the product/feature is priced right and that you are not leaving money on the table. Sounds simple, but in today’s highly competitive world, it really is difficult.
How much discount should you give to the channel? How would you incentivize them to be a multiplier to your sales force by bringing deals to you? You need to be thinking about these all the time. This is why product management is such a strategic role.
Continuous Feedback By Talking To Customers And Testing Assumptions
A business is not a business without a sales transaction. That transaction happens between you and the customer. The product that you are delivering must solve a customer problem. That is the only reason why a customer will buy your product.
Did you deliver what the customer needs? Is the product easy and intuitive to use? Is the customer using all the features or did you just want time, effort and resources to add features that you thought would be useful, but the customer thinks otherwise?
What will the competition do? Are you ahead of them? How long until they catch up or even leapfrog you? While you can look at the marketing collateral of the competition to understand what they are offering a much better way to learn this is to ask your customer(s). What do they think about the competition? Just ask. It’s surprising to me how many salespeople and product managers simply do not ask. Yet, most of the time your customer is willing to talk about the pros and cons of every vendor they use.
This dialogue and feedback have to be continuous. That’s how you win!
These are just the basics that you need to master on the path to becoming a jedi product manager.
Let me know what you think? What would you add?