Good product management decides about the success of a product and therefore often about the success of the total company. In the very beginning of a company, you mostly try to please just a few customers and they drive the change of the product. But as a company grows and customers pleasing everybody does not scale very well. Different customer groups do have different expectations on the product. Hence you need to make sure that your product evolves in the right direction pleasing the right lucrative customers. If you want to please everyone you will not deliver value for anyone in the long run.
At this point a good product management needs to take over to decide about the development of the product. Which part needs to grow, which parts needs to modernize, and which needs to be phased out. A product manager can take the decisions based on knowledge about various aspects of the product using multiple skills and technics. Seven very important aspects of good product management are mentioned in this article. Following these aspects will give a good start on the path to a good product management and concluding a good product.
1 Product managers know the goals of the company.
Product managers are responsible for their product. They make decisions about new features, modernization as well as removal of functionality. Any product decision needs to support the overall company goals. It can be the goal to gain new customers or to make a specific customer group happier by solving their specific problems. It can be a goal to reach a certain level of cloud compatibility or to make the customer onboarding process as easy as possible. Whatever the company goals are each product manager needs to know and internalize the goals. Product manager align the product development based on the goals and make sure to focus on achieving the goals. Additionally, product managers need to have the commitment that long term company goals are important enough to really work on them. Not aligning the product to the company goals and you will never achieve your goals, but instead have a bouquet of product features that do not match each other.
2 Product managers know the business of the company.
Product managers understand the economic value the company’s product create for the products users and the company itself. To be precise product managers need to know the amount of money the company makes by selling a specific part of the product. How much money does the company make by selling a specific module or feature set, how much does the customer pay to use a specific service. Without this knowledge the product management did not have the chance to produce value for the company. Instead, they create costly change that will not sell very well.
3 Product managers do know the products customer.
Knowing the customer is key knowledge for every product manager. You need to know the motivation to use your product and especially the problem your product solves and needs to solve in the future. Product managers need to experience the usage of their product as close from the real user as possible. In a business-to-business environment you also need to know the decision maker regarding the sales process of your software. Without knowledge of your customers problems, you will be trapped thinking within the solution space. Instead, you should think within the problem space of your customers. Product managers need to ask how the feature solves a problem for the customers.
Product managers find solutions for the problems customers and therefore allow every team member to create value working on the company’s product.
4 Product managers know the product.
A company’s product can be very complex. A lot of features, subproducts, modules, … have been created in the company’s history. Product managers need to be the expert when it comes to their team’s product and the company’s product. Without this knowledge the company will spend money on developing features twice or even three times. Additionally, you will develop features that customers already rejected in the past.
Using this product knowledge, product managers modernize and expand the product where necessary and refrain where possible.
5 Product managers make their decisions based on the market, competitors, and actual trends.
Product management does not happen in a happy bubble with no influence from the outside world. Instead, various factors from outside do need to influence the decision-making process regarding your company. It may be the competitor, that does have this one killer feature that your product is missing. Without the knowledge about this you will wonder why you do not sell your product well, but your competitor does.
Additionally, you need to know about the market. Which group of companies in the market do you currently address? What is the rest of the market and what will be needed to address their issues as well. Without this knowledge you will evolve your software, but nobody will need it, or you will try to please anybody because you do not understand that there is a market for your product.
6 Product managers communicate decisions about the product development.
Product managers make decisions daily. They decide which experiments to start, which feature to implement and very important which feature not to implement. Any decision regarding the direction a product evolves need to be transparent to the whole company. Your colleagues need to know why their requested feature has not been implemented they way they expected. Your developer needs to know about your decisions to implement it right. Product management is no ivory tower. Product managers need to tell the how and why of their decisions.
The transparency gained allows everybody to focus on achieving the product goals.
7 Product managers decide about the creation as well as the discontinuation of products.
When it comes to the new creation of a product the idea might come from any part of the company. But in the end, it is the product manager who need to decide if the new product will fit in the companies, customers, and market context.
High level managers tend to take the decision on their own and force the product manager to follow their way. Only the product manager does have the necessary background information.
Additionally, product managers decide about the end of live of a product. They know if there will be a valuable market in the future and if the product will stay maintainable.
8 Product managers know technics and tools
Decisions taken by a product manager need to be comprehensible and reliable. The best way to achieve this is using best practice techniques and tools to get all the data needed to understand product, market, competitors, and company. This way at least a sufficient number of decisions can be retraced later.
Product managers use data driven decisions to deal with the unexpected (e.g. experiments and agility).