A tribute to Product Managers
When it comes to Product Manager (PM) roles there are lots of expectations and a million requirements. I recently saw a PM job description, it wasn’t a senior position, but it was asking for 10 years experience in e-commerce and among other things it was asking to: be a data expert with knowledge of analytics tool, be a machine learning geek, be customer’s best friend, have prior “hands-on” developer experience knowing python and SQL, have a good understand of architecture design, have strong leadership and storytelling skills. Some companies are looking for superheroes.
Below I collected the most important superpowers that PMs should have:
Customer Expert: PMs are responsible for discovering the problems that they will solve or the need that they will fulfill by introducing a new service or product. They need to know WHO the customer is, create the personas canvas that is going to lead to a target group for the new service or product. However, there is no secret recipe to discover all the above, like running an algorithm that will give you all the customers and their needs, preferably grouped by need or customer segment. Give your PMs time to do proper product discovery, it will save you in the long run.
Visionary: Product managers should capture the vision of the product or service. At the same time PMs need to define the product strategy, OKRs, product roadmap, metrics to measure success and keep iteration on all the above. Obviously, they don’t define all these alone, but they are accountable for any deviation, pivot, delays or failures. Trust your PMs, give them space to iterate and learn. They don’t have to deliver the perfect plan from day 1.
Influencer: While defining the product vision and strategy together with the relevant metrics, the PMs must clearly communicate all these to stakeholders, management, development team and get their buy-in. In other words, the PMs need good communication and persuasion skills and be able to influence decisions. The PMs should be good listeners but should be listened as well.
Experimenter: Assumptions or hypothesis should be validated first. PMs should define a clear hypothesis before running any experiment, so it’s clear what is being tested and measured to decide if it’s a success or not. Risk and uncertainties in the product roadmap should be tested and validated first. These experiments might take some time, so give your PMs and development teams the time to come to a meaningful conclusion.
Collaborator: A day in PMs life will have several rounds of meetings, workshops, analyzing and strategizing. PMs don’t do these things alone. They have a team with different skills, they talk to stakeholders and users. They have to put people together, organize collaboration workshops, see what everyone is doing and be some kind of facilitator while keeping in mind the product goals and product vision.
Decision maker: People expect that PMs “just make a decision” when a group of people (stakeholders, dev team, management) cannot agree. They expect the PMs will take the decision when it comes on what to build next and prioritize. However, that’s not an easy job. PMs need to balance between time it takes to gather the information to take a decision and actual taking the decision. There will be times that the decision will lead in a wrong result or direction. It’s ok, focus on the learning and move on.
At then end of the day, it all comes down to balance. Product Managers have many superpowers and they need to have a balance between all these activities. PMs must balance otherwise they cannot go far with this for a long time. My advice to PMs: don’t try to reinvent the wheel from day 1. Try to adopt habits, frameworks and way of working and then adapt these to your needs.
“Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
Steve Jobs, 1996
What are your superpowers? Feel free to share them!
