Product Management In a nutshell. You may have read or heard about… | by Saromi Segun | Apr, 2024

You may have read or heard about product management or probably you are a certified/trained product manager. My intention is not to teach you what product management is all about but to summarise what a product manager needs to do to be successful.

I will first say that product management sits in between UX, technology, and business. It is a role that intersects between the user experience/customers’ needs, technologies used to create a product, and the business that maximizes values from a product built with the technology.

In order words it marries these three aspects in such a way that creates values for both the user and business. This brings me to the point that a product manager is somewhat multifaceted and able to incorporate business, customer, and technology viewpoints.

You need to focus on understanding your customer’s problem. You can not solve a customer’s problem without understanding it and this comes by listening to your customers/users. If you don’t listen to your customers you end up building a solution that solves a problem nobody has.

Spend more time listening to your customers to understand their problems but not how to solve the problem. Stop listening to your customers when it comes to building solutions. It’s your job as a product manager. Only listen to their problems.

The competition and user reviews are such a rich source of information that money can not buy. It’s through the competition and user reviews you understand your customer’s problems. You can get instantaneous feedback on what users think about your product and other people’s products.

When you are doing customer research by getting people’s reviews you can come out with amazing information about how your customers are using your product and intend to use your products.

The fact that you have to watch the competition does not mean you should spend so much time doing so or even worrying about what the competition is doing. Some are helpful and some that are not helpful.

So we have to ask ourselves if implementing the competitive trends will help in solving customers’ problems. If it comes up with something that works or what customers want. Do not hesitate to take those ideas and add them to your product to give you a competitive edge.

No matter how experienced you are as a product manager, do not get carried away building great products without thinking of how they will fetch you money. Remember to put the money into consideration.

We need to always ask ourselves a fundamental question; would the customer pay for it? What is their willingness to pay for it? Some might just want the product/feature for free and may not be willing to pay extra for it. When you are solving a problem and building a product you have to make sure that people see value enough to want to pay for the product else you are doing charity.

On the other hand, do not concentrate so much on getting the money. That is to say, stop worrying so much about getting paid even though you want to get the money. There are some features you can put in your product to make your customers know you care and you are loyal to them.

These features may not come with some form of payment but it does bring value to your products and make your customers more loyal to you. These are features you can not put an ROI on; it’s just appeal to the emotional and social needs of your customers. It’s important to let them see enough value in what you are doing even though they would prefer it for free.

Speed up! Inaction destroys a lot of value, even products. We need to understand the cost of things to how many story points or days it will take to complete it. You need to know the cost of delay, inaction or not doing anything. Any time you put off making decisions, you are destroying value. The feature and the value we ship have a limited shelf life. The longer it takes them to get to the market, the less value they have.

To achieve speed sometimes we may have to learn to say no! As product managers, we do not say enough “no”. We have lots of people to deal with and sometimes we might be caught in the circle of trying to please them all. Remember our role is not about making people happy, it’s about making your customers/users happy which will bring value to the business.

Businesses sometimes tend to drift to start solving their problem instead of customers’ problems. This can be visible when they roll out a product they think will bring the money but customers/users do not see value enough to want to pay for it. As product managers, we need to always advocate for the customers to bring the customer perspective to the situation so that we can eliminate this drift.

Also, we need to empty our knowledge of what we feel we already know about our users/customers to always listen and understand the customer’s needs which can change over time. A product manager who thinks he knows his customers so well that wants to predict their behavior without hearing from them is like a male gynecologist.

Beyond all these, product management is a mindset and a craft that comes with empirical knowledge. You have to make your own mistakes and path and grow along.