Product Management 101 — by me, Fernanda Aguiar — Post 3: Data, Sales and Back to Business | by Fernanda Camilo Aguiar | Jun, 2024

Happy Tuesday, everyone 🙂

On my final post with the basics of #ProductManagement, I would like to share about what I see as important for any #Product person to know and do regarding #Data and about the sometimes controversial relationship with the #Sales team — and how that connects back to the #Business objectives.

1. Data: As a PM you should at least master the basic queries that bring the data from your main workflow (number of customers, views, purchases, and so on) to monitor your results and analyse the features you are launching. Of course this varies a lot within the market, and many teams have experts data analysts to do lots of these, but even so, I’d say that a good PM does know their way around the data and uses that to make better prioritisation decisions and also better measure the results of the features they implement. See, it’s very important to achieve direct results as a PM such as low scope change, high and increasing delivery rates and velocity, high number of features delivered and so on. BUT, all of these metrics are there because you are trying to achieve something — be it increase your user engagement, your revenues by increasing purchases and recurrences, growing the customer base and so on. If you are doing great on the first metrics but these are not translating into the business needs your team should be addressing, you can’t say you and your team are doing a good job. And that’s why you should keep track of these metrics as much — or arguably even more — than sprint velocity and JIRA charts, as these only tell a very narrow part of the story and the bottom line you are trying to achieve (in my opinion, and I know this is a controversial one because it touches how far one should go “beyond just the job description” but I’ll leave this to another post).
2. Sales and back to Business: to close this circle I want to touch on how you should relate with the #sales team and then how this should connect back to business. See, as PM you are in charge of planning roadmaps, sprints and backlogs. You can only do that, if you have clarity of where your company/product is planning to go, what are the sales and revenues targets and what are the target customers you’ll go for next — and what are their needs. The answer to most of these questions lie in the Sales Team business plan and they are the ones first-hand speaking and reaching out to clients and getting their expectations and needs — as well as also closing specific contracts with specific requirements your product should deliver next in some cases, especially B2B. So, if they have all these answers from the source of the information, the earlier you know about these plans and requirements that will hit your team in weeks or months, the earlier you can start preparing to deliver that and the less your plans will have to be wrecked by something that you had no idea about and suddenly shifted your team’s priorities. Therefore, do create a routine and way of updating yourself with all the latest regarding sales and target customers and always use this information to guide your plans for the team and product. And, of course, use these to also measure the success of the features you are implementing and take it back to business, because bottom line you are doing your work always to reach some level of customer satisfaction, revenue, user traction or any other business metric.

As always, let me know about any additions and feedback! Have a great week! 🙂

Cheers!