What every new Product Manger should know about Product Management
Product management appeals as a very fascinating profession to most. PMs are often called ‘mini-CEOs’, ‘customers in the room’ among other things. And while these are almost true, there are a lot of other facets to product management which not everyone tells you.
I moved into the PM role only last year, but thanks to the fast-growing organisation I was a part of, I’ve learnt a great deal. So, here are my two cents on what every new product manager should know about product management.
Less is more.
As a PM, you will often find yourselves in situations when your CEO will ask to lay down a plan to improve revenue by 10% in the next 2 weeks. And if you are a driven individual, more often than not, you will wrack your brains to come up with a radical, out of the box idea. At this point, take a deep breath and remember a combination of small scale initiatives can bring a much larger impact than an untested radical idea. This is not to say that the latter won’t work. It can, but it comes with a cost, cost of time. Remember the importance of ‘less is more’. Once you go ahead and do small, almost trivial changes, you’ll be surprised by how much a copy improvement can impact your numbers.
Read.
In my most recent stint as a PM, I got a golden piece of advice. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. Some of the world’s brightest minds have done tremendous amount of research on product management and what frameworks work best in various situations. Whichever problem you are trying to solve as a PM is either a solved problem or is very similar to a solved problem. You need to get yourself acquainted with the right resources and learn from the best creations. While first principle thinking is a beautiful thing, it need not be applied everywhere. There are books out there which will change the way you think and make decisions as a PM. One such book I recently came across and highly recommend is Nir Eyal’s Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Unlearning > Learning.
We all have pre-conceived notions. We may not realise this, but we do. And unlearning is getting rid of them. Before I got into product management, I somehow always had this idea that most people function the way I function. If I am not liking the ‘blue tick’ on WhatsApp, most people wouldn’t have been liking it too. If too many app notifications are frustrating for me, it must be for most. I found out that that in fact is not true at all. Product management is about discovering new things and being fascinated by them. If you really want to build great products, you need to keep discovering how your customers function and more often than not that is not how you function.
Fail fast.
You will fail as a PM, whether you like it or not. You will have a great idea, you’ll do tons of data crunching, you’ll conduct n number of meetings to convince your stakeholders and launch that feature you’ve always dreamt of launching, and for some reason, you will fail. That’s inevitable for innovation. If you don’t fail, you don’t learn. However, make sure you do it fast. If you are not 100% sure of an idea, break it down and act on it with tremendous speed. Get a buggy version out just to test your idea, this is what truly defines a MVP. (I don’t mean your MVP should have bugs though!) You might not be creating any immediate impact with this approach, but you’ll save yours and your company’s time and effort by failing fast and not acting on your instinct to build the full-fledged feature.
Get ready to make decisions, fast.
A product manager not only has to take decisions for whatever he/she is accountable for, but also for whatever the team is unable to decide on its own. Not all questions have perfect answers when it comes to product management, that is why a lot of people consider it a combination of art and science. Should we allow users to come back to this page once they drop off? What should appear if the user refreshes the page, should we restore the data? Three things are crucial to effectively tackle such a situation. First of all, you should be empowered within the organisation to take decisions. Otherwise, you will just be a communicator between your team and the decision making authority, which will not make things any faster. Second of all, you need to be an intuitive PM, you won’t get data every time to back your hypothesis, especially if you are launching a feature for the first time. You need to take a qualitative decision here. Talk to peers, take notes from the industry, talk to customers if required, but take that decision fast. And lastly, you need to have a plan B. Your decision can backfire. You might have assumed that only 2% customers will be affected by a bug, this can be 20% in reality. Think through in advance what you would do in this situation.
I’ve only just gotten started with my PM journey, but product management excites me. Product management is all about understanding how people function and what you can create to help people, and so every human interaction is a learning. Every person is telling you something about what they need, how they think, what their problems are and with a profession like this, you have the power to change their lives.
