Learn some tips on how to become a great technology product manager.
After 17 years in start-up and enterprise product development and IT operations, I’ve experienced first hand the wide spectrum of talent in the field of Product Management. From inspiring to detracting, Product Managers play a sensitive role in any organization’s strategy. The effectiveness of the individual leading this effort will determine the success of the internal operation and outward projection of evolution. Here are thirteen attributes to consider in your role as Product Manager. Product Strategy is not Product Management. Product Strategy is a responsibility of your officers, board of directors, client advisory board, and internal employees (business analysts, developers, product managers, operations, sales, client services). The best Product Managers take responsibility and own the incredibly challenging job of organizing all of this input and applying order (agile prioritization) to the chaos. Product Management is not Project Management. Organizing a backlog is one part of Product Management. Your Project Management skills will definitively come in to play if you’ve transitioned from Project to Product Manager, but this time around you will need to say “no”, break some hearts, and take responsibility for the delivery of your overall roadmap. Reporting on status is a big change vs being responsible for it. Don’t talk about an idea. Organize it. While you may have a lot of great ideas, chances are others in the org already thought of them and more likely, your competition. Talking about the great things a company can do is frustrating and wastes precious time, especially in a start-up. If an idea is truly important to you, schedule a meeting, create a presentation and explain why it should be important to others too. Avoid sending emails about your competitors and how we should do what they do. How many emails do you get per day from those one or two people that start with “Read this, this is great, we should do this.”, followed by an insanely long and time sucking email written be someone else that may or may not impact the org? It’s not a bad idea to keep your colleagues up to date about what’s happening in the outside world. However, if your mouse starts to drift towards that Fwd button, write a sentence or two to describe WHY it’s important enough for your recipients to stop what they’re doing and pay attention to you. Your competitors’ strengths are not a means to promote internal guilt. It is important to consider the competition with every prioritization exercise, however, many times product management will use this external pressure as a beating stick. The best product managers will acknowledge the great work of your competition, but dovetail how your organization will trump the idea, pinpoint the weakness and — if all of the groups in step #1 agree that it will be beneficial to the mission. Stop sending emails about how we should talk about how to make a new product better. Enough talk. This is what we in technology call “meta work”. It’s not really work. It’s work about work without doing actual work. I bet everyone in your org knows how a process should be improved. The great product manager will spend the 30 minutes to sketch what the executable plan actually is. Talking about the process improvement without the initial sketch wastes time Stop scheduling product strategy whiteboard sessions. I’ve come to the conclusion that whiteboard sessions are merely smoke-screens that attempt to shield inept product management from actually having to do real work (aka “meta work”). Once a quarter or twice yearly should be the max to serve as a touch point for business plan update, especially at a start-up where time is severely restricted and execution is key. If you’re scheduling weekly or twice monthly whiteboard sessions to talk about product strategy, then your business plan is seriously flawed and your department or start-up won’t be long for this world. Not to be confused with DevOps sprint planning whiteboar…