As a Product Manager, I often describe what I do falls into 4 or so buckets:
- Strategy:
- High-level: Where should the product be going?
- Low-Level: What is the next thing we should build that will help us get closer to our goals/target?
- Execution:
- Discovery: What is the exact problem are we trying to solve and what is the outcome we want to achieve?
- Delivery: How do we build this solution we “discovered” during the Discovery phase?
- Analysis: Did what we design and build during the Execution Phase solve our users problems and bring us closer to our goals? Why or why not?
- Support: How can I help the rest of the organization? This includes working with Customer Success to help them understand the inner workings of new features/processes, and working with Marketing to educate our customers on these new features/processes.
I strongly believe that a Product Manager who cannot execute is not a Product Manager. You may have the great ideas/strategy but if you cannot work with your product team to validate the idea, build it and ship it, then what’s the point of having all these great ideas?!
I also believe that we’ve greatly improved our Delivery Process over the last 10-20 years. We now use some version of Agile with Scrum, Kanban, Sprint Planning meetings, etc. to break things up for the Engineering team, and most organizations deliver on at least a weekly basis or are hopefully moving to Continuous Integration and/or Continuous Integration.
The Analysis aspect is also easier than before. We can use services like MixPanel, Kissmetrics, and Amplitude to see what actions our users are doing, then create dashboards to understand trends using Periscope and Chartio.
What I’ve felt we’ve not yet effectively conquered as a disciple/profession are the Strategy and Discovery aspects, which are the most critical for any tech team since they help you avoid building crap.
Strategy is something I’ve recently started diving deep into so at this time I do not have a strong viewpoint to share, but I can share with you on how my Discovery process has changed over the last 3.5 years of being a Product Manager.
Couple things to note before we continue:
- I am not taking credit for coming up with any of these processes. Some were in place when I arrived while some I helped shape.
- These version numbers are arbitrary in a way; I grouped certain things together depending on when I started at a new company or when we found a process that worked for some timeframe.
Not sure what Discovery is or what some more detail, take a quick look at this post before continuing.
Let’s jump in:
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