What I Learned From a Decade of Product Management Experience
Five key lessons I learned over the last ten years
Five key lessons I learned over the last ten years
Time flies. I remember as if it was yesterday when I started my adventure in the digital product management world. Since my first day, more than a decade has passed. So far, my journey has been exciting, challenging, painful, energizing, and sometimes embarrassing. I’ve experience with diverse scenarios, from startups to massive corporations, from Brazil to Germany. Also, I’ve been in different domains, automotive, public sector, marketing, online shop, retailer, among others. In short, I’ve collected many stories to share and still gathering more.
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my journey and developed five key lessons I learned during this decade. In this post, I will share them with you. These lessons are things I wish I had known before. I hope you can benefit from these learnings.
You can also find similar content on my YouTube channel. I posted the following video recently. Feel free to watch it and provide me with feedback :)
1 — Leading vs. Management
I perceive the name Product Manager as an unfortunate one. The job isn’t about managing at all. Product Managers do not supervise anyone in any team. You may think you’re responsible for managing the product itself, but this shallow view isn’t helpful either. Leading teams is what successful Product Managers do.
When I started my career, I thought my responsibilities were the following:
Managing the Product Backlog
Managing stakeholders
Providing precise requirements to developers
I missed the point. These are activities and not responsibilities. When I understood I had to move from managing to leading, I perceived my responsibilities as the following:
Setting directions
Establishing meaningful goals
Creating value as fast as possible
The point isn’t to manage anything but to create an environment where great things can happen.
Don’t confuse Product Managers with bosses. That was a massive wrong perception I carried over for years. I hope it doesn’t take long for you to realize that. In my current company, we changed the role to Product Lead to emphasize everything is about leadership instead of management.
Note: Scrum has the role of Product Owner, which is the best fit with a Product Manager, a job in itself. No matter your title, it’s about leading and not managing.
2 — Only the End-Users Know What Works for Them
One of the most dangerous parts of product management is assuming we know our end-users needs. When we let our assumptions drive our decisions, we can be sure to hit a wall.
A wise colleague once told me that assumptions are the mother of most fuck-ups.
One of the key learnings I had over the years is: don’t assume you know what works with real users; validate your assumptions as soon as possible. This approach will save you time and energy. Yet, you need to be careful how you uncover what fits your end-users; some answers will mislead you. Here are some examples:
Does this feature work for you? Avoid closed questions as much as possible because they don’t create the learnings you need to advance.
What do you think of this solution? Although this is an open question, it will mislead you. People are often polite; they may tell you the solution is excellent and yet never use it.
What do you miss in our product? Users are the wrong people to define solutions but the best people to describe problems. You shouldn’t focus on identifying which solutions or features end-users miss but on understanding which problems they face.
“It’s not the customer’s job to solve their own problems. It’s your job to ask them the right questions.”
― Melissa Perri
Be careful with the confirmation bias. You don’t want to validate if users like your features; you want to ensure that their problems are solved. Starting with the problem in mind is key to success. Once you put energy into uncovering problems that users care about, creating meaningful solutions becomes easier than you can imagine.
3 — Establish Partnerships
Let me ask you some questions. Please, reflect on them for a minute:
Do you know who your customers are?
When was the last time you talked to them?
What challenges do they face?
What do they care about?
I hope you didn’t come up with business stakeholders for the first question. A common trap is to treat stakeholders as the end-users of your product. When you fall into this trap, you can expect a lot of disappointments. It’s not because stakeholders want something that you must do it.
It annoys me to know that many companies hire highly qualified Product Managers to please stakeholders. Product Managers often receive unprecedented pressure from business people. The relationship becomes similar to a service provider relationship; stakeholders define what to do while Product Managers focus on the execution. This scenario is a massive anti-pattern, and it will ensure mediocrity. This hinders collaboration and limits teams from knowing which problem they should solve.
Stakeholders are neither your customers nor your enemies; they are your partners.
Establishing partnerships with stakeholders is vital to success. A sustainable partnership will enable to create value instead of producing useless output. As a Product Manager, you won’t have all the required domain knowledge to deliver valuable solutions. Meanwhile, business stakeholders have the complementary expertise you need, e.g., finance, marketing, legal, etc. That’s why you get to collaborate with stakeholders.
4 — Set Meaningful Metrics
Product teams exist to create value. Most people I know would agree with that, and at the same time, everyone may interpret the word “value” differently. Unfortunately, I misled many teams because of my faulty understanding of “value” let me share some common misconceptions:
Maximizing the output doesn’t mean creating more value. More features may lead to more confusion instead of helping users benefit from your solution.
Increasing the velocity has no guarantee of maximizing the value. You may deliver 100 story points and create no value, and in contrast, you may provide 1 story point and dramatically increase the value.
Meeting arbitrary deadlines is one of the most pointless things. It’s not because you delivered everything on time that you created value.
Don’t confuse output with creating value.
The first step is to clarify what value is. Then, define how to measure the outcome. Let me give you an example. Consider a scale-up online shopping company; after proving its potential, the business needs to grow its audience while keeping the clients satisfied. You could use the following metrics:
Growth rate: percentage of growth: it can be measured daily, weekly, or monthly.
Conversion rate: percentage of users who get to the sales process end. It can also be measured daily, weekly, or monthly.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): the willingness to recommend your product to a friend. The NPS helps you understand whether you have promoters or detractors.
Such metrics can help you understand if the output you deliver yields value. However, these are laggard metrics, and the issue with them is that you know something went wrong once it’s too late. You feel powerless as you can’t find anything actionable. Laggard metrics take a while until you can get the metric calculated. For example, measuring the NPS means several customers went through the whole sales process and rated the product or service. Once you realize your NPS is bad, it’s already too late to react.
Relying on laggard metrics ensures slowness and doesn’t produce learnings as fast as you need to create value. You need something to speed up your decision process. I found the solution with leading metrics.
Over the years, I’ve learned the importance of coming up with actionable metrics. It’s simple to do it; take a laggard metric and evaluate what would lead to success. Consider the NPS, “What would lead to a satisfactory NPS?” This question will help you find leading metrics. For example, delivery time, if you fail to meet the expectations, clients will probably rate you negatively. Still, you would be able to act faster once you focus on actionable metrics.
Leading metrics empower you to act in a corrective manner instead of being powerless.
5 — Don’t Be Afraid of Decisions
Edward Deming once said: “In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
Every day, Product Managers face situations where they need to decide; how you deal with that is vital to your success. For years, I used to think I needed data to back up all my choices. Eventually, I realized data isn’t always available, and I still had to decide what to do. I used to freeze without data, which led to a lack of progress.
“If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition, taste, heart.” — Jeff Bezos
I learned the following; no decision is worse than a poor decision. When you avoid deciding, you ensure the team remains stuck, and you miss the chance of progressing. Meanwhile, a poor decision will create some learning.
Jeff Bezos says we have two types of decisions: reversible and irreversible. Most decisions can be reverted, and when that is the case, we should aim for a fast decision and learn from our experience. However, when the decision is irreversible, you should put reasonable effort into it. For example, becoming a parent is irreversible; you cannot change that. Therefore, you should evaluate carefully before coming to it.
Product Managers shouldn’t be afraid of decisions; they should be afraid of missing opportunities.
Final Thoughts
Digital Product Management is still young. I do not allow myself to stick to my old guns. Whatever I know now is based on my experiences and learnings. However, remaining open to different perspectives is essential to growing product management.
Curiosity is one of the secrets of outstanding Product Managers. They keep trying different things and learning from everyone around them. Asking questions will open a world of possibilities, while finding answers may limit you.
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