Effective Product Management is a hard skill to have and a lot has been written about how to excel in this role. You need to be really good at Strategic thinking, Understanding customer needs, Executing really well and Leading and Inspiring cross-functional teams, often without direct authority. All that is true… And a lot more too.
But there are some very simple day to day activities and techniques that I personally feel will make you a better product manager over time and help you have all the skills mentioned above. Let’s take a look –
Become a Tech Support person sitting in your chair, at least a few times every week
This is not as hard as it sounds. If you have access to your call centers, go there, listen to real customers call, not just listen – actually answer those calls. But many times it may not be practical and may demand a lot of time/ money. However you can do the same sitting in your chair. Your company may have websites for customers to post problems, like a user community. Members of the community (and sometimes your Support staff) typically resolve those problems for each other. If that also does not exist, customers must be creating LinkedIn and Facebook groups themselves and posting problems and seeking solutions. Subscribe to those groups and fora and answer the questions. You will learn a ton about how your product is being used, or what are customers’ problems or needs. Just reading is not enough. Actually try to provide resolutions. Sometimes you may have to work those situations yourself first before you could answer, and that’s cool.
Build a personal team of customers
Have a team of few trusted customers whom you are often talking to. They share their problems, and needs, but they also happily user-test everything for you, even the ideas. It is not practical to run big Alpha and Beta test programs every time you want to make a change. Yet every change should be user-tested before getting shipped. 5-10 customers is a good number to have in the group depending on the product; more than 10 may be unmanageable, less than 5 may be too few. You should provide incentive to them like free software, upgrades, subscriptions etc. for their help but this group should be a trusted group willing to work with you.
Caution: Be aware of the distribution though. If your product caters to very different kind of customers and this group is skewed towards one kind, you may not get the best results. Try to have a balanced group, but again, having it non-perfect is still better than not having it at all.
Talk to Marketing, Sales and Finance guys often
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Ship high-quality stuff
As a product manager owner, you are as good or bad as the quality of your deliverable. If you follow the above techniques, coupled with good execution, chances are you will deliver high quality stuff. That will build credibility with customers, and cross-functional teams and you will be more effective next time you are doing the same. A positive loop starts. And if you can’t ship high quality products, nothing else matters.
These techniques are so simple to follow and yet so underrated, many product managers don’t use it consistently over a long period of time, but those who do, stand out.
Let me know if these thoughts resonate with you and if you would like to share other simple techniques that you have personally found to be effective.
[Image courtesy: http://bit.ly/1GtEUCa]
