A couple days ago, I presented to ~90 fellows of the latest iteration of Venture for Canada, a program designed to prepare recent graduates for the life in a startup. Somehow, my 45min presentation took almost 3 hours, as the class was thoroughly engaged and had some very insightful questions.
After marking the presentation, I quickly realized the following slides were basically a distillation of my knowledge as PM after 6 years in the field.
Enjoy!
While contemplating the PM Scorecard and why organizations need to invest in understanding their PM needs, I was in need of an example that would make the most skeptical skeptic become a believer in the idea: PMs are not the same and are not generalists—even though Mind the Product thinks so. 🙄
As I was floating my “three modes of PMs” theory/framework to PMs that I know and respect, I was met with some criticism, but overall a lot of support and enthusiasm of the framework! By talking out my ideas, I started to realize that this framework could help PMs in the following ways:
Initially, I was concentrating on what PMs do in each of these modes, but Rob Hayes of foundation.pm pointed out a useful addition: how they work.
So without further adieu, here’s the latest iteration of the Three Modes of Product Managers framework:
I never read Product Manager job descriptions.
They are often “basic,” describing the most tactical and mundane aspects of Product Management as if they were looking for somebody who hasn’t done Product Management but somehow has at least seven years of experience…
Don’t believe me? Here are some common requirements stated in job descriptions:
Determines customers’ needs and desires by specifying the research needed to obtain market information.
Maintains and organizes the backlog based on priorities and strategy
Launching product features, beta programs, and marketing programs
Meeting customers and presenting the product roadmap
These “responsibilities” make the job sound far more robotic and laborious then it is! To combat this, I often find myself using way more than my “10 mins to ask questions” during interviews and scheduling additional interviewers to understand who they need, as interviewers are not always aligned on who they need.
(Here are some of the questions I ask when interviewing, and some particularly for startups)
The wrong PM hire can be detrimental: causing the company not only the person’s salary, recruiter fees, but a bad PM hire can even cause loss of market share.
I’ve always said that getting into Product Management is harder than becoming a doctor or a lawyer, as with those two professions you can go to school and if you put in a good effort, it’s highly likely you’ll end up being what you set out to be.
Product Management is a bit different as most companies wouldn’t just trust somebody to come in with no experience to take over their products. Thankfully, we’re starting to see programs out there to help folks become Product Managers and continue developing their skills as PMs.
Some of those workshops/programs can be quite costly so how does one who finally became a PM continue to be a PM, but more importantly, being the PM your company needs? How does one continue to assess their skills to ensure you’re plugging in the necessary holes where it counts and strengthening where it counts?
I’ve been pondering such questions for the last couple of months and with some inspiration and help from SVPG and Cal Newport’s and Scott Young’s Top Performer course, I’ve developed a skill matrix to help you identify where you currently are as a Product Manager and help you target the most important (aka bang for your buck) areas for improvement.
From time to time I work with promising, small startups who are not ready for their first PM but are looking for product expertise to guide them towards product-market fit.
Recently, I was working with a startup that focuses on helping their enterprise clients identify employee engagement issues. Since they felt comfortable in their current core product, they were interested in expanding their product into something they believed would be complementary to their core value proposition: providing advice to corporate leaders on how to take action to fix/mitigate/reduce HR/personnel issues, which would then boost employee satisfaction.
Being a bootstrapped and small startup, expanding their product line would be risky, especially as they have a small developer team and could either work on improving their core product, or work on this new advice system that would enhance their product value, deepening their retention hooks, and further differentiate themselves from their competitors.
The team was also very excited about incorporating machine learning into their advice system, allowing them to scale the service to match their current customer base and their future base.
After internally talking through the risk of working on a new product feature and the opportunity risk of not exploring the new product feature, the team was confused on how they should proceed.
That’s when they called me…
Once I was caught up, I could see the dilemma they were in. There was a lot of value in guiding corporate leaders on next steps, and if they could prove their system did provide such value, they could use their core product to measure the change in employee satisfaction based on their advice!
So how could they potential explore this new advice system and reduce the huge risk of getting it wrong?
As a Product Manager, I love having One on Ones, or 1:1s as I like to call them, with my direct manager, whether it’s a Director or VP of Product or the CEO. On a bi-weekly cadence, we get thirty minutes, or more if needed, to connect on a number of topics affecting myself and my team in the present, as well a chance to talk about the future including my growth and the company’s future.
Over the last few years, I quickly realized a byproduct of these conversations: fewer surprises during my formal reviews. The One on Ones gave my manager and myself enough time to identify and nip issues in the bud before they blossom to cause havoc. Not only do I look better in those reviews, but my manager is even happier.
The format of One on Ones is geared towards a manager and their direct report, which is probably why most Product Managers don’t have One on Ones with their team members.
And I think that’s a tremendous lost opportunity for Product Managers. Here’s why:
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Marc Andreessen famously stated “software is eating the world“, and very few doubted him on that. But I think there is a new king in town: Artificial Intelligence.
Every day we are hearing of amazing new applications of AI (check out Business Insider’s cool list here) that are slowly changing the world, or sometimes quite rapidly. More recently, Google has been able to turn those low-quality Street View images from Google Maps and make them beautiful, all using AI with no human interaction.
As always with new, revolutionary technologies, we have the constant fear that our jobs we’ll be replaced by that technology. It’s no different with AI. AI will kill the need for humans in some blue- and white-collar jobs, and hopefully be starting with the dull and dangerous jobs. My sincere hope is that AI will do a number of things for the human race:
Out of those three above, I think #3 will directly show those worried about AI’s impact on our jobs that AI is more useful than dangerous, and it’s designed for your benefit. Eric Schmidt recently shared the same sentiment when he mentioned a McKinsey study stating that 90% of jobs are not fully automatable, meaning AI will be there to help, not replace.
(I couldn’t find the mentioned McKinsey study with that particular fact, but this could have been it)
So how can AI help me as a Product Manager go home sooner?
As Product Managers, we’re always looking to validate our ideas as early as possible before investing more into them, and then actually proving our features are providing value as intended, either by watching our users’ behaviours through metrics, or qualitative feedback.
When solving small problems (or building small features) it might make sense to immediately build the solution if you have enough conviction from your problem and solution discovery process, and it’s small enough that you can kill later if the feature misses the mark entirely.
But for larger problems, which may require a larger feature set to solve, you may need more conviction before building the entire feature/solution set, and that’s a good thing; nobody wants to waste months building a feature nobody uses.
One strategy I’ve often used is to A/B test the smallest version of the feature. That might seem like a “duh, of course” moment, but the question I’ve always contemplated is, what is the smallest version of the feature?
As designers, whether we are Product Managers, Product Designers, or in HR, there are consequences of what we do, and often we’re okay with that. Uber knew it would be taking away jobs from existing taxi drivers, travel search engines like Hipmunk and Kayak knew they were making travel agent less relevant, and Hotmail, Gmail, FedEx, and UPS knew they were making the postal service less necessary. Isn’t the point of incremental innovation and disrupting incumbents to provide a better product/service at the same or lower price?
But what about the unintended consequences? I wager that many of us do not spend the time deeply thinking of how our actions and products affect the world.
It’s a start of a new year, 2017 to be exact, and you might have decided that 2017 is the year you jump into Product Management. Excellent choice (I’m biased, of course)!
Getting into Product Management is not easy. I often joke that it’s simpler to become a doctor or a lawyer than to become a Product Manager. Unlike law and medicine, there’s no formal education program (yet) that will guarantee you’ll become a Product Manager. In other words, to get into Product Management, you have to be in Product Management. No company out there will just hand the reins of their product’s future, and most likely company’s future, to just some random person who applied to their PM job posting and somehow got through the HR interview.
Product Management is one of the most difficult positions out there: not only do you need to find out what the market needs and deliver it, but you also have to consistently manage/handle everybody who has an opinion on what you’re doing and what you should be doing…in the most delicate, diplomatic way possible! And that’s not even the crux of being a PM, so what is? Your ass is on the line every single day!
Although it can be stressful, I think it’s the most fulfilling position I’ve had, and it’s something I can see myself doing for the next 5 to 10 years easily!
So how does on get into PM? There are two ways I’ve seen it done: