Demonstrate the value of Product Management
I’ve had the pleasure of working with extremely thoughtful people in my career.
At Trulia and Zillow Group, I had peers with decades of experience in Design and Engineering across many types of companies and interacted with many types of Product Managers.
At Shopkick and now Brilliant, I have worked with a lot of the same engineering team for the past few years. The engineering team is extremely strong and known for much more than just development.
Through these experiences I have not only deepened my expertise in product but also learned a very valuable skill — how to demonstrate the value of product management to a variety of different personalities and roles, some of which may not have worked with a product manager before or may have worked with largely inexperienced or ill-defined roles in Product Management.
Here are some of my lessons and stories from my career.
Don’t assume you are always right
We all have egos. Product people aren’t exactly known to have insignificant ones either.
Remember that last conversation when you came in strong with a specific opinion and realized you were missing a part of the picture?
Take a step back
Your role as a Product Manager should be to take in opinions, distinguish the realities at that time period in your market and product, and provide valuable decision making.
Documentation is a skill
Sounds funny, right? It’s probably one of the biggest skills— in addition to organizational structure and planning — that I took away from my time at Accenture Strategy.
We are all people, and we all have memories. Most of the time, we remember decisions or meetings with a similar outcome. There are times we don’t.
Ironically, those times tend to be the ones that cause team the most grief.
Documentation can seem intimidating and almost pointless after the fact — after all, it’s shipped, right?
Wrong.
Consider the following:
- What about the person that joins after you’ve left a company?
- Will people understand why you and your team made a decision a certain way?
- What about in the present — how do people know you focused on the right thing?
The trick to documentation is that it’s the tool that can bring together the entire company at every level of the organization. It can simplify things to the highest value order and at the same time venture into detailed requirements for the engineering team.
Start early to develop the culture
Start early, at the concept and ideation stage. Create a Product Requirements Document (PRD) that truly is a live document. It should become part of the culture of the company from the beginning, not an afterthought.
It will mature the entire organization and unintentionally force focus in team decisions.
Earn the trust of your team
Joining a new team as a Product Manager isn’t always easy.
You may be looked at as the “middleman” that suddenly joined, and is making decisions without the proper context. Who’s to say your decisions are the right ones?
Everyone faces such challenges in new jobs, but this is exacerbated by the fact that the PM’s responsibility includes making the final call on many product decisions.
Knowing your value on the team
Start by determining your value within that team and product area.
Let’s take my current role at Brilliant. We create a hardware product — a smart home control that is built into your home by replacing your light switch. While we manufacture these devices, we also build software experiences across the control and mobile apps on iOS and Android that allow users to have their dream smart home.
The value I will provide on the software side is clear — I have past experience in software product management, UX, and analytics.
On the hardware side, it becomes less than obvious. I have no prior experience in mechanical or electrical engineering or in hardware product management. The last thing I want to do is waste a team member’s time by providing feedback or decisions on items that are outside my understanding and scope.
I don’t, for example, expect to be providing commentary or feedback on the circuit board design.
Where I do think I can create value, however, is building business cases, conducting user and market research, providing feedback on the industrial design, and improving communication/collaboration for better team decision making.
Identifying the above ahead of time can have such a profound impact on how you are perceived in the team and if done right, ultimately, builds implicit trust.
Make team-driven decisions
We have all met the infamous dictator PM, who forces implementation without team buy-in and collaboration. While this may be needed during some wartime decision making, it is not a successful long-term strategy for any team leader, least of all a Product Manager.
The goal is team driven decision making.
How can you motivate a team to make consensus-driven decision making by truly taking in differing opinions and maintaining the focus at the goals at hand?
There are a few things to consider:
- What is the background of the team you are working with? Do you even know them and have a relationship with them?
- Has your team worked with a PM before?
- How was your team making decisions before?
- What is the motivation of each team member? How can you work with the natural drives of each individual to relate it to the ultimate goal — to help the company succeed?
Answer each of the questions above. This should give you a framework on how you work with your team.
Bring solutions to the table, not just problems
A lot of time, as humans we like to focus our attention on what is immediately wrong or missing in the situation.
To echo JFK…
Ask not what your team and company can do for you, but what you can do for your team, your company, and ultimately your users.
This mental model will help you approach problems with a constant focus on how you can focus the conversation on solvable and constructive items. Not on emotional and irrational ones.
Trust me, it’s worth it.
At Brilliant, I have been working with the entire team on building out this culture from the ground-level since I joined this past March.
I too had to earn the trust of my team members and effectively demonstrate the value that Product Management can bring to, in this case, a traditionally engineering-driven company.
The road there can have windy turns in the beginning, but once you’ve hit a few checkpoints, you realize you’re not driving by yourself anymore without GPS.
You’re actually with the rest of your team on a road trip. And you have Google Maps.
