The Day You Became A Better Product Manager

You may be an individual, entrepreneur, solopreneur, creator, artist, product manager, business manager, or a large enterprise team member. You will certainly have some role in managing your business’s product to optimize and improve the chances of your business success.

I have put together my learning and experiences of over 2 decades, uncovering simple tips that helped me manage the product development process better by doing it myself and assisting others to do it.

The simple tips below provide actionable ideas for developing strategy, execution plan, collaboration principles, communication skills, brainstorming techniques, user science tools, and customer development.

Strategic Thinking:

1. Use brainstorming tools and mental models to think outside the box constructively to develop ideas, validate and build the product.
2. Structure and conduct strategic conversations with your team and other team members to discuss things in more depth and jointly decide the course of action.
3. Whether you are dealing with top-skilled or low-skilled payers, you need to formulate team structure, strategies, and correct roles to beat the challenges and win the game easily.
4. Constantly seek opportunities to spot technology and digital trends to add features and benefits useful for your users and your business to stay relevant.
5. Keep learning, stay focused, and build a network of alliances so that stakeholders can look up to you as a go-to expert on the subject.

Communication:

6. Hone your writing skills to write user stories, generate insights from user interviews, articulate clear workflows, formulate business logic and write proposals to get management buy-in.

7. Master communication skills to present and lead your team during 1:1 meetings, group meetings, external meetings, and customer meetings.

8. Be ready to visually present data, prepare presentations and make presentations to the stakeholders.

Collaboration:

9. Create an environment where your team members and peers feel like thought partners winning together, delivering ideas that lead to substantial value creation.

10. Always negotiate with stakeholders efficiently while maintaining healthy relationships.

11. Participate actively in product management processes, group meetings, setting meeting goals, creating meeting agendas, inviting the right people, taking notes, giving your full attention, and getting other participants involved.

12. The product management role involves solving reactive problems bringing together different stakeholders to examine the incident, the source, and the potential root causes.

13. Proactively identify, diagnose, and solve issues faced by customers while they use your product.

14. Efficiently set priorities and effectively influence stakeholders and other teams to get their buy-in for priorities.

15. Stay connected with the executive team and stakeholders to nurture strong partner-like relationships.

Technical:

16. Your technical acumen to spot trends, understand product complexity from a technology perspective, maintaining a reliable technology stack, and achieving optimum-performance levels will aid in minimized engineering risks.

17. Product management involves lots of decision making with data analysis and translating data into insights and actionable results.

18. Identify, Visualize, and scope user requirements, develop UX, and construct the product prototype successfully.

19. Understand digital marketing avenues such as SEO, keyword optimization, backlinking, social media marketing, content marketing, etc.

Detail Oriented:

20. When user issues come up, you should be able to trace problems.

21. You should articulate the feature requirements and write the requirement specification with little or no errors.

22. Schedule and deliver product features on time with no bugs.

23. Anticipate and estimate the efforts with technical and functional teams to develop the product deliverables and timeline.

24. Proactively anticipate and address implementation challenges to meet the business objectives.

25. Ensure products achieve continuous successful outcomes.

26. Support product execution across multiple squads

Customer Development:

27. You must produce the hypothesis right and solve the customer’s problem so that the customer will use and pay for the product.

28. You must conduct customer interviews, focus groups, surveys, usability tests, A/B tests, analytics, and use-case studies to build the product customer wants.

29. Possess and exhibit natural and intuitive user empathy, usage measurements, and analytics to effectively validate pre-launch and post-launch hypotheses.

30. Use product management requires you to choose user science tools and effectively use the user science tools.

31. Use usability testing successfully and without bias to build a more effective product.

32. Generates high-value observations from user science tools to decide product roadmap and product direction.

33. Advise customer-centric test selection, and set up testing process across environments to Debug/remove biases, if any.

Management:

34. Play the role of product evangelist responsible for setting up vision, strategy, goals, and tasks aligned with your teams and peers to achieve business success.

35. Develop product roadmaps, timelines, resources, and financial projections about the costs, potential revenues, and development timelines required for product development initiatives.

36. Ensure the product, design, development, test, and other teams have the tools and processes they need to do their jobs successfully.

37. An excellent team builds a great product, and hiring great resources defines the kind of people you need to hire, make hiring decisions, and onboard people and support them in delivering the planned results.

38. Design the organizational structure to meet your company goals.

39. Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders for resourcing needs/strategy.

You agree: product management is complex and challenging. It involves idea development, interfacing with multiple teams, developing and executing release schedules, ensuring customer success, and communicating with stakeholders.

These 40 tips will help you take an inventory of efforts involved in building and managing products. Let me know what you think?