Tag Archive for: Product manager

Not everyone leaves school and lands a role as a product manager. For many, becoming a PM was the culmination of an accumulation of skills and gradual transition from other positions.

These were some of the points made in a recent panel discussion of product management professionals held at the headquarters of Pivotal in San Francisco.

The roughly two-hour session, titled “How to Be the Best Product Manager: Navigating Evolving Tools and Trends,” touched on a range of issues currently impacting PMs.

We’ll be highlighting various topics from this panel in the coming weeks, but today we’re focusing on the conversation that unfolded around the various ways the panelists moved into product management, and the personal attributes needed to be successful in the role.

The event was organized by The Product Stack — a small group of like-minded companies, including Jama Software, which coordinates meetups around the country and hosts a Slack channel to support product managers.

As a quick reference for this excerpted discussion below, here’s the lineup of those who participated:

Poornima: There are a lot of people who want to transition to product management for the first time. Share a challenge of what that transition was like for some of you — from what your previous role was into being a product manager.

Jim: I was working for a startup helping to manage a community and my previous experience was not in the technical world. I did some technical writing and corporate training for tech companies, but I wasn’t really a technical person.

The startup was failing and the company was looking for the next thing that would move it ahead because they still had a little bit of VC money left in the bank. The VP came to me and said, “We need to get this one right, so how do we know that this thing we are thinking about is the right thing?” That was my first experience in product management.

I went through a process of interviewing potential customers and talking about the value proposition of the product. And uncovering what problems it would solve and all these things that we do as product managers and take for granted. That was my first foray.

Amy: When I graduated, I started as a management consultant for the federal government. In the federal government, they are very risk averse and things move at a snail’s pace compared to a startup, for example, which is where I eventually went.

When you jump into a startup environment, you’re pushed to make decisions in an instant. It’s this culture shock in the shift, and I think being successful is being able to understand the culture and the way that a company operates. It becomes more about: Can you handle it? Is that something you’re comfortable with to be successful?

Poornima: What about hard skills that product managers need to have?

Jeana: I think product management is very hard because it’s a horizontal role. And, actually soft skills matter the most in product management. When I’m exploring candidates for a product manager, I’m looking for candidates with coaching ability, adaptability and a certain type of humility.

The thing you realize as a product manager is that you are constantly getting it wrong. I’m looking for resilient folks because you are going to be wrong more than right, and you need to embrace that just like you are learning a new thing.

For folks who are really like, “I need to be right,” product management can be a super uncomfortable place because everybody’s constantly telling you how unhappy they are with you. Occasionally it goes right, and they’re like, “you’re the best,” but like 99 out of 100 times they’re mostly unhappy with you.

Poornima: Maybe we could talk about some of the concrete skills people need in product management, just so that we don’t leave people hanging.

Robin: Well prioritization is probably the first one that comes to mind. I actually started more technical. My dad was an engineer and I thought, “This is cool I want to figure out what he’s doing.” I played with the computer when I was really young, but I wanted to know where the thing he was working on came from. And that’s when I started to learn about this person who organizes what he works on. As I got older, I understood that was product management.

So prioritization is probably the top thing and then communication is kind of both the hard and soft skill. The ability to synthesize what you are trying to achieve into words people can remember and actually write down, I would say is another essential skill. It’s one of those things you can see in interviews: Can someone take what they are trying to describe and write it on a white board and in order? The prioritization and communicating “the why” behind that is really essential.

Stay tuned for more highlights from the Product Stack panel in San Francisco, as well as announcements about upcoming events. In the meantime, check out our white paper, “Top Three Frustrations of Product Managers and Tips to Avoid Them.”

With ever-looming deadlines and high expectations, it’s possible that software developers at some point in their careers will be subject to “crunch time” — weeks or even months of intense pressure that requires many extra hours to deliver a product on time.

These extended workdays, fueled by caffeine and cortisol, can wreak havoc on the health and mental well-being of those involved, and nobody does their best work under those conditions.

Product managers have a responsibility to their team members to plan and execute development projects in such a way that mitigates the need for such soul-crushing marathon sessions, and the successful delivery of a project may depend on taking those steps.

Failing to plan to avoid the need for crunch time can lead to team member flameout, and somewhat ironically, jeopardize a project’s timeline.

Planning and Communication Beforehand

Communication is a central component to fostering a development environment where developers’ resources are put to efficient use, limiting redundant efforts wherever possible and clearly enumerating every team member’s responsibilities.

Ernesto Mosquera, President at Global & Sustainable Products Consulting, emphasized this point in an interview, highlighting not only the importance of communication and planning in navigating a complex product development project, but also the key step of getting input from workers on the ground.

“For an on-time delivery it is essential that preliminary planning of the project is done in detail and involving all key resources,” Mosquera says. “In this phase, a realistic scope and timeline for the project is created that matches the requirements of the product management.

“My experience has shown me that if in this phase you do good and accurate work communicating with the team members and involving their input, you create the right foundation for a successful and on-time delivery.”

Staying on Track

Part of this involves setting realistic expectations from the outset and building in extra time for any complex development project that could result in excessive crunch time.

Establishing this time buffer allows team members to work at a sane, healthy pace, and can avoid last-minute time crunches that are all-too-often necessary elements of many development projects.

Of course, sometimes projects are thrown off track by unforeseen problems or changes. But the earlier and clearer those changes are communicated down the chain of command, the less likely they will lead to a potentially project-killing situation.

In these cases, using an effective product development platform that provides end-to-end traceability can also prove advantageous. With full traceability, teams can accurately assess the impact of changes up and downstream while making time to ensure full coverage for priorities and keeping everyone aligned throughout development.

Product Manager’s Responsibility

Lance Ellisor, Chief Growth Officer at Journyx, said he favors an approach where a product manager creates clarity and ruthlessly prioritizes throughout the process, which hedges against zero-hour panic and frustration as key team members realize they’ve been working from an out-of-date set of instructions.

“The product manager’s most important responsibility is to ensure utter clarity — of both scope and timing — between the stakeholders (customers/market) and the team delivering the work,” Ellisor writes in an email.

“Not only does this clarity avoid last-minute changes, it also optimizes project costs by frontloading any changes such that they have the least cost and the most impact on the project success.

“This means involving stakeholders (and the team) in clarifying needs, reviewing the proposed design, interacting with prototypes, test-driving the solution throughout as it’s being built, and affirming the candidates for release.”

Staying Afloat

The responsibility for building a foundation of clarity of purpose falls squarely on the product manager. Prioritization of project goals and deadlines must be understood and communicated to the stakeholders, and it’s not always an easy decision to make, according to Ellisor.

“The product manager must prioritize the needs with vigorous discipline, and frequently throughout the project as realities unfold and the time gets short,” Ellisor writes. “This is where a product manager quintessentially proves her mettle, as she’ll have to make some very tough tradeoff decisions — informed by both stakeholder needs and engineering constraints — to ensure a timely delivery of a solution that has the most value.

“It’s akin to having to throw some supplies off the boat in order to keep it from sinking; not a fun responsibility, but heroic.”

By meticulously planning each phase of a project, including budgeting time for the unexpected, and above all continuously communicating changes and expectations to your support staff, you can greatly reduce the odds of those long, miserable hours of crunch time.

Learn how to overcome more development challenges with our white paper, “Top Three Frustrations of Product Managers and Tips to Avoid Them.”

Tight deadlines. Sky-high executive expectations. Regulatory compliance. Near-constant pressure from above and below.

A typical day for a product manager involves juggling these things, knowing answers, and above all, maintaining a rosy disposition in the face of immense frustrations.

Over time, the combination of these stressors can overwhelm and induce exhaustion, but it’s not an inevitable condition.

With a new year upon us and the rapidly increasing complexity of new innovations, product managers can help themselves (and, by extension, their teams) by remembering some basic guidelines and good-sense strategies to ensure day-to-day demands doesn’t snowball into burnout.

Get Back to Basics

Especially in complex development projects, it can be easy for a product manager to get lost in the thicket of expectations and deadlines. Zooming out and revisiting the project’s initial goals can offer some much-needed perspective and serve as a helpful reminder of what you’re doing and why.

Objectively assess whether the progress being made aligns with the project’s overall strategy, its initial requirements and timelines, and recalibrate as necessary to keep things on track.

Taking advantage of product development tools can also help you get a better grip on the intricacies and updates to projects and alleviate some headaches as well.

Managing a complex development process while relying on a mix of constantly changing, mismatched set of emailed documents and spreadsheets as your source material can make the life of a product manager incredibly difficult.

Tackle Solvable Goals

When facing dozens or even hundreds of milestones in a development project, it can get to the point where everything just sounds like white noise.

That’s a good sign that it’s time to filter out what can wait and shift to the most important or achievable goals.

Racking up small, daily victories creates momentum and chips away at what appears to be an otherwise insurmountable to-do list.

You can also set yourself up for success by establishing more realistic achievements and tackling them early in service of broader, more ambitious ones. Part of this involves saying “no” to suggestions or additions that can induce scope creep and threaten to throw a project off track.

Trust Your Team

A good product manager will build supportive teams that can adapt priorities as shifting project realities dictate.

Sometimes that entails delegating responsibility down the chain, rather than the product manager’s natural tendency to want to take everything on themselves.

By enlisting team members to handle certain responsibilities, you free your own mental bandwidth for big-picture tasks, and foster a sense of purpose and ownership among team members.

Using development tools that facilitate real-time collaboration and transparency for tasks— especially as staff are heads-down on work and don’t have time to devote to lengthy meetings— can go along way in providing efficiency, visibility and accountability.

Take Care of Yourself

Lastly, while it sounds cliché, being mindful of your physical and mental health really does translate to the quality of your work. This includes everything from taking simple breathing breaks to exercising and ensuring you’re sleeping enough.

Knowing your body and mind’s warning signs of stress overload and listening to those signals can help you stave off exhaustion.

Nothing grinds a development project to a halt faster than an absent product manager, and those who employ some of these strategies can blunt the impact of stress and greatly improve their odds of delivering career-defining finished products on time this year.

VPs of Product shoulder a formidable set of full-time challenges. Accountable to both business and engineering plans, a wise Product leader recognizes that clear communication and meaningful collaboration are a means to an end, and therefore matter as much as the goals.

Whether you’re managing performance and production with Agile, Scrum, Waterfall or a hybrid development methodology, dealing with obstacles and priority changes leaves you little time for error or waste. One overlooked production error, miscommunicated change in requirements, or delayed decision can, at best, increase the number of iterations and the production cycle.

When you oversee product development you’re also, in a way, overseeing people development, because people build products. And because people build products, it makes sense that the tools your people use must be built with an understanding of how people work together.

Whether your primary concerns are for traceability, requirements engineering and management, or enabling shared reviews of action items to ensure team alignment, if your product tools aren’t intuitive for engineering and business users, those tools won’t get used.

Choosing the right product development tools is a serious matter, because as a VP of Product, you have so much riding on building right and moving fast:

Tall tasks:

  • Approving project plans, setting high-level product strategy across multiple projects and initiatives, ensuring that projects properly support strategic initiatives, and managing Profit and Loss.

Pressure points:

  • Lacking visibility into key decisions that affect schedules, progress and outcomes.
  • Struggling to find evidence that teams are building the right things that will deliver value to the customer.
  • Avoiding detail overload.

Burning desires:

  • To establish a high-level view of the entire portfolio of projects in order to quickly asses scope, risk, change and progress.

With Jama, VPs of Product can turn awkward “Growing Pains” episodes into agile “Greatest American Hero” epics.

How so? You’re able to…

  • Keep the entire team aligned with the strategic goals of the organization.
  • Gain greater visibility into what’s being built to ensure the product delivers on business value.
  • Communicate easily with the entire project team to get clarification and decisions made, regardless of location.
  • Ensure faster times to market.

Read Game Changers Who Play to Win: Omnigon to see a real-world example of the ways Jama can help VPs of Product stay on top of the product development game every step of the way.

Check out other ways Jama helps business and engineering teams get and stay aligned:

How Jama Helps VPs of Sales

How Jama Helps Systems Engineers

How Jama Helps QA Leads

How Jama Helps Project Managers

How Jama Helps Business Analysts

How Jama Helps Product Managers

“There are so many moving objects when managing a product. You must be aware of them all (managing vendors, internal politics, management structure, development teams, testers, project managers, designers, architects, businesses, customers, etc.), and like a game of chess, you must be thinking ahead several moves in order to react (or not) properly.
Nailed it. And, we would add, the processes you depend on to bring products to market must also adapt.

The many steps involved in building products—moving from product idea to release and, hopefully, to customer approval—have traditionally been relegated to product and engineering teams, at least until something goes wrong. Companies strive to update product delivery processes for the way business works today by involving stakeholders from multiple departments and including executive leaders. “Many hands make light work” goes the saying, the idea being that a collaborative, dedicated effort toward a shared goal should lead to desired results.

“Should” is the key word here. The challenges of integrating hardware and software, handling employees in multiple locations and different time zones, and dealing with immediate customer feedback, among many other things, adds a great deal of complexity to an already high-stress, fast-moving process. Companies recognize the business value collaboration can bring, but it’s much easier to advocate for than to organize and execute. Too often, collaboration devolves into design by committee.

Forrester Consulting conducted in-depth surveys with 150 senior business and IT professionals at enterprise organizations and found that a hefty one-third of companies release their products late. The top reason? A classic: Unclear or changing requirements. The surprising drag on reaching the finish line in time? Delayed decisions.

Executive leaders are the acknowledged decision-makers at the high level—giving the green light to build product X with Y specs for Z cost—but during the cycle of product development to release, no one has to make or push through more decisions than product managers. And at the rate 21st century companies conceive, build and release products, the time spent getting to market matters more than it ever has.

So while Matt Khoury astutely testifies to the many ways that product managers encounter problems on the path to release, we would add a note of caution for all companies who conceive and bring new innovations to market:

If you expect your employees to focus on outcomes, you need to adapt and you must also align teams; enable fast decisions, reuse and stakeholder involvement; iterate quickly and provide stakeholders and all participants with real-time context right up to the point of release.

The success of your product depends on it. Just ask your product manager.