If I were a Product Manager
It’s time for Monday musings. When I first thought of this title I thought of the movie “Fiddler on a Roof” and the song, “If I Were a Rich Man”. I had grandiose thoughts of writing some ideas in a way that matched the lyrics but alas that is beyond my skills.
Let’s get into it. I’ve seen both good and bad product management and to me a few themes have emerged. For reference, I’m talking about complex products with a direct sales force though some of this is likely applicable to other products as well. First, why am I qualified to opine on this? Well, I ran multiple pre-sales engineering teams. Myself or my teams were the ones selling the product. I’m the one who saw the client’s eyes light up in excitement or frown in perplexion. Every decision product management made I had to explain to the clients. All of this played out right in front of me; I had a front row seat. Here are my observations.
Some product managers seem to think they are in sales. They sit on every client call, refine endless powerpoints and spend their time trying to get more traction for the product. I get that certain high profile opportunities may require the PMs help with the roadmap but this should represent a small portion of their time. Your job is to chart the direction of the product not to sell it directly (I’m excepting trade shows and the like). Don’t try to do the sales person's job because then who’s going to do your job?
Many product managers lack technical depth. They can’t demonstrate the product and don’t know how it works under the covers. I’m not suggesting that PMs be programmers but some technical background is essential to chart product direction. If you lack technical depth you don’t know if a feature is easy or hard to do. Won’t that affect your opinion of prioritizing features? If you can’t demonstrate the product how do you know if a new feature request is already covered in mostly or a similar way? If you want to weave in a new feature, what is the most logical way to incorporate it without it jutting out like a sore thumb? Technical depth is essential.
Some product managers seem to see themselves as collecting ideas from the developers and writing them down into requirements. Now let me be clear, a product manager should definitely listen to the developers for ideas. Those ideas should be written down and categorized. But, and this is important, the developers are not driving the bus, you are. This developer led approach leads to problems. Most developers love the thrill of coding something novel and interesting. That’s great but not a criteria to add features to a product. Leverage the developer’s insights but chart your own course.
Establish product themes. As examples for credit decisioning: ease of use, AI model integration, testing & simulation, variable manipulation, flow control, scripts/looping and light programming. These are just examples. I’d then gather requests for features and map them to these themes. Based on my own intuition (and customer feedback) I should know what themes are important. Then I can set both broad product direction (a theme) and individual features. Otherwise you have a jumble of features lacking coherence.
Lastly, pay attention to your customers! I’ve heard so many people talk about attending product forums, providing specific feedback and then… nothing. And next year they have to go through it all over again. Let’s be clear, some customers' ideas will be bad or so one-off that they have limited utility. That does happen. But a lot of specific feedback comes from real world use. Ideas and features that seem good on a PowerPoint sometimes just aren’t as useful as you think. Or with small tweaks can become FAR more useful. Gather client input and take it to heart, they are (after all) a real user.
I’ll wrap this up as I’m probably straining your attention span. If you want to discuss product management feel free to reach out to peter.j.accorti@gmail.com. Oh, and I listened to “If I were a Rich Man”. Too much “biddy biddy bum” I never could have made it work. Happy Monday,
Peter
