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great product manager must be able to interface with the business, technology, and design departments and to harness their collective knowledge.
Agile does indeed promote a better way of collaboration and a faster method of building software, but it largely ignores how to do effective product management.
That’s when I changed my approach. He reminded me that my job was to produce value, not develop my own ideas.
It requires a strategic mindset that understands the customer, business, market, and organization. This is a critical skill set for a great product manager.
The real role of the product manager in the organization is to work with a team to create the right product that balances meeting business needs with solving user problems.
To do that, a product manager must be humble enough in their approach to learn and take into account that they don’t know all of the answers.
Ultimately, the goal for the product manager is that — reducing risk by focusing on learning.
One of the biggest mistakes companies make in hiring a product manager is trying to find either a technical or market expert.
A product manager must be tech literate, not tech fluent.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned in product management is to always focus on the problem. If you anchor yourself with the why, you will be more likely to build the right thing,”
The biggest issue I hear from leaders, when I go in to help their organizations become product-led, is that their product managers won’t step up and “own the product.”
Product managers ultimately play a few key roles, but one of the most important ones is being able to marry the business goals with the customer goals to achieve value.
If you want to build products that create value for your businesses and customers, you need good product management foundations in your company. If you want a career path for your people, you need to give them this foundation so that they can grow into more senior roles.
Setting up an associate product management or junior product management program is key.
director of product becomes necessary to help promote strategic alignment and operational efficiency, connecting their product group back to the product or portfolio vision.
“Board members care about the financial impacts of the technology and product decisions. A successful CPO needs to be able to translate their actions into terms the board will understand.”
chief product officers also have three key traits that set them apart: they inspire confidence, empathize, and are relentless and resilient.
Having a strong product leader in the C-Suite is a critical step to becoming product-led.
My company, Produx Labs, has partnered with Insight Venture Partners to create a CPO Accelerator that develops VPs of product into CPOs for their companies.
Companies tend to organize in three main ways: value streams, features, and technical components.
Keeping the strategy and the value execution together is key.
Product managers need room to manage toward an entire outcome-oriented goal.
organizing teams around your strategy,
There are many teams working to optimize components but not the whole.
Strategy creation is the process of determining the direction of the company and developing the framework in which people make decisions.
This vision states not only why the company exists but also the plan for getting there. It aligns the team in the right direction.
Strategy is a deployable decision-making framework, enabling action to achieve desired outcomes, constrained by current capabilities, coherently aligned to the existing context.
you’re aligned coherently and you have a good strategic framework, you can then allow people to make decisions without a lot of management oversight.
good company strategy should be made up of two parts: the operational framework, or how to keep the day-to-day activities of a company moving; and the strategic framework, or how the company realizes the vision through product and service development in the market.
Strategy is about how you take the organization from where you currently are and reach the vision. For strategy to be created, you must first understand the vision, or where you want to go.
Product initiatives translate the business goals into the problems that we will solve with our product.
“As a Netflix subscriber, I want to be able to watch Netflix anywhere, with anyone, comfortably.”
To determine whether we are getting closer to achieving our product initiative, we need to break the success metrics into something we can measure on a shorter time scale. We call this the team goal, and it’s how we measure the success of the option. Although
Reserve your time and energy for the things that will make or break your value proposition.”
Concierge experiments deliver the end result to your client manually, but they do not look like the final solution at
In product-led organizations, people are rewarded for learning and achieving goals. Management encourages product teams to get close to their customers, and product management is seen as a critical function that furthers the business.
We’ve talked about the importance of having the right roles with the right people in them and then supporting them with a good product strategy.
Living Roadmaps.
Product Roadmaps Relaunched.
Poorly-constructed roadmaps are the source of much tension between product and sales.
Product management enables the sales strategy.
Creating working agreements and roadmaps that can be communicated to customers is key to developing a good relationship between product and sales.
But, as product teams scale to more than a few teams, keeping track of progress, goals, and processes becomes a challenge.
In larger organizations, you need the same thing, but at scale. We call this team product operations.
The product operations team should be made up of a combination of project managers and product people.
“Success for you would be automating away your team.”
This is not a team that is meant to be large. It’s an efficiency engine dedicated to automating, streamlining, and optimizing.
Talk to your bosses about what success really means.
Tying retention numbers to their success metrics can also help to ensure that they target the right people.
You should be rewarding people for moving the business forward — achieving outcomes, learning about your users, and finding the right business opportunities.
