The 2nd and 3rd Ps of being a PM

I guess I’m ultimately calling this the 3Ps of being a PM. Very Kotler. Much jargon. In the off chance that you missed the first post where I talk about Prioritization being the first and foremost attribute of a product manager, you can read it here. 

At the outset, a product manager is required to have a very good understanding of the market, competition, business models, future trends apart from knowing the user thoroughly. The insights gained from the above and channelized into better decision making is what, I reckon, constitutes the second important P of being a product manager — Pulse. 

I may be oversimplifying it but with my limited experience and reading about product failures and successes, it is very important for the product manager to have her ears close to the ground. This enables you to not only understand the environment in which your product is being used/consumed but it also helps you predict/anticipate for the foreseeable future to a certain degree. 

  • Getting a pulse of your customers’ problems, needs, aspirations, behavior helps you build better products. Clearly, a no-brainer.

  • Getting a pulse of your competition helps you identify your competitive advantage. Go a step further and talk to your competitor’s customers. It helps you beyond the realm of product management, say if, Company X is kick ass at marketing. Can those serve as inputs to your internal stakeholders? Or can there be possible synergies that can be explored to benefit you and the competitor?

  • Getting a pulse on trends helps you build better products. Trends would encompass everything from market/economy to consumer/behavioral to technology. How would you incorporate these trends to make your product better?

  • Acting on impulse helps you build products effectively and efficiently. Here’s a really neat graph published by Hacker Noon which hits the spot about what I’m trying to get at. This point transcends the scientific aspect of being a product manager and makes it seem like product management is also an art form. Unfortunately, this can be learnt only through experience, but here’s a heads up nonetheless.

All in all, pulse, is a very fluffy word to describe what I just wrote but I believe the best product managers have this as an unsaid trait. It comes naturally to the curious and the ambitious. Personally, I’ve been trying to better myself at getting a pulse of the aforementioned things. I try to read more, I listen to relevant podcasts and I avoid any blinders restricting my vision lest I miss out on anything. 

So…great, you’ve nailed your product-market fit, you’ve validated your ideas, you’ve prioritized your backlog…what next? 

The third important P of being a product manager is Project Execution. Notice, how I don’t say project management. How a product manager brings design and technology together is what constitutes execution to me. Project execution would certainly vary from company to company. In more established companies like an Amazon or Facebook, a product manager isn’t alone in execution. One works with technical product managers, program managers, engineering managers, tech/dev leads and so on. But if you’re in a seed-funded or series A funded startup, product managers end up playing a larger role in execution. The scope of responsibilities vary, but I’m going to talk from my own personal experience. 

  • People — The success of project execution solely depends on your team. It is important for the entire team (designers, engineers, QA testers) to be on the same page. But hey, you’re a product manager. You have no authority over everyone else. This is where as a product manager, you need to play your ‘people skills’ cards well. I strongly believing that motivating the team before and after the project, irrespective of the size of the release, is key to having the team stick together. You show them impact, the potential of a product they’re building and how important each of their contributions are. A product manager must in no way take credit away from the team, after all they’re doing all the heavy lifting. Sure, you “conceptualized” the idea but make no mistake about it — your team will lose faith in you.

  • Timelines — You will need to approximate timelines pre-development while sprint planning. You will need to get finer timelines from design and development. You will need to give out timelines with additional buffer, wherever necessary, to your stakeholders. Timelines are sacrosanct. There will definitely be times where you don’t meet these deadlines but it’s crucial to inform your stakeholders about any delay and possible alternative timelines.

  • Development — If you’re a non-technical product manager, you would be solely reliant on your engineer leads or senior engineers. Invariably, engineers do come back to product managers with doubts, cases missed, cases where they’re block. It’s your role as a product manager to ensure that any doubts/blockers are swiftly resolved. You gain the respect of an engineer if you clear her blockers promptly.

  • Testing — One of my strengths as a product manager is that I’m very hands-on with my product during development and testing. The more rigorous the testing, the fewer chances of your product failing in the user’s hands. Once the engineer(s) hand over the product to the QA team for testing, I step in between to do a pre-UAT (user acceptance test) where I try to ensure that the product is behaving as it should for the users’ major cases. I say ‘major cases’ because you are generally constrained for time. The pre-UAT testing phase significantly reduces the back-and-forth exchanges between QA and engineers. Once the QA team gives a sign off on product testing, I usually perform a UAT thoroughly to ensure that the product is ready to be shipped.

  • Shipping — Here you have it, your feature/product moved from a staging test bed to your production servers. I prefer to ship out new releases on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays or when the next day is not a holiday. That’s because in the slightest chance that there is a bug, you have the team available to quickly re-ship a bug-free version as soon as possible.

  • Post-shipping — Is a product manager’s job done after shipping? Hell no. Sure you may have dusted your hands and got that awesome product released. While this doesn’t fall under the purview of ‘execution’, how else will you measure how successful it is? Are your users using the product as intended? Whether it’s a beta release or a full fledged roll-out, it is essential to choose the right metrics and have those metrics closely monitored either via data pulled from the database or analytics tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel. A topic like measuring success metrics would require its own blog post.

So there we have it — Pulse and Project Execution, the two remaining Ps in what makes my three essential Ps of being a product manager. While I can’t cover everything with this 3Ps post because, let’s face it, product management is a fluid field, part science and part art. 

I would love any feedback on this post. Do write in at me@vcent.in if you would like to talk further about product management.