Product manager, problem finder
I get it. You really like to see things get done. It’s so rewarding to make things happen! And you have the power to make it happen! You want to be helpful, and people are asking for your help all the time, you have the answers and you love it, you want to be a good team player!
Moreover, you’ve got skills, you have that flare when speaking with customers and that passion for UX design, you know the product like anyone else and you seem to be the natural candidate to put out fires.
The bad news is… it’s not your job.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How much time do you spend in analyzing the problems of a single customer rather than your target market as a whole?
- Are you writing marketing requirements or scope of work?
- How many insights do you extract from RPFs rather than FAQs?
- How much time did you spend in conducting a demo for a client last week?
- How much time do you spend in understanding the deep nature of the problem rather than figuring out solutions?
Like all product managers, I fall in the built trap all the time. Working on solutions, building prototypes, designing, writing solution specs, putting out fires and spending most of my day doing things that I couldn’t even imagine when I tried to make a list of my priorities in the morning.
And that’s ok if you are in a small company, in the end somebody’s gotta do it… Sometimes it’s even healthy work (this is my personal excuse).
Just be aware of what hat you are wearing at that moment!
Be aware of how you spend your time and don’t forget your priorities. Spending time supporting others is not your main job, you are failing what you are hired to do. Make sure you have done your job, before spending time helping others. If you find yourself spending a lot of time supporting sales, for example, maybe it’s time to hire a new sales engineer!
This seems obvious and straightforward, however, it took me years to fully embrace the most important challenge of this role:
Focus on problems, not solutions, and empower your team to solve them.
That’s easy to say. The reality is that these simple words distill the principles of an entire profession and it is really up to you to develop the tactics and frameworks to execute it effectively in your specific circumstances.
Moreover, everyone in the organization seems to know what your job is better than you, everyone from its perspective has different expectations: giving tech pills to marketing for the website, helping sales to close deals, read out loud Jira for developers. But no one seems to agree on who is ultimately responsible for surfacing the actual market problems.
Who in your organization is the expert on the market problems?
In the real world, is definitely not marketing. Marketing tends to be more and more focused on lead generation, SEO, and very oriented on promoting rather than understanding customers and the market. Sales? Not really… Sales listen to clues of the problem and try to map them to the solution we offer. Who is focused on people who are not shopping? Who is focusing on competitor’s customers? And the whole marketer in general?
That’s your job.
To gather signals from all the valuable internal and external sources, surface and prioritize the problems worth solving, the “jobs to be done”, and identify an outcome-driven product strategy to solve them in a margin-enhancing and difficult-to-copy way.
The voice of the customer is a good point to start, but sometimes customers are terrible at telling you what problems they have, instead, they give you solutions all the time. If you are lucky, you might have a researcher in your team helping you with that.
Be aware of the time you focus on individual customers, your role as PM is to surface market problems, rather than distilling single customer problems.
Balance your efforts on growing your product solving problems that the market experience now, planning carefully for the problem to address in your next iteration and defining a strategy for the future. Depending on the size of your company, you might have specific roles and departments for each of these functions such as Product Marketing, Product Strategy, Offering Management department, Solution Marketing… (so confusing!). Many successful teams, in fact, seems to have a Product Marketing team focused on growing the present product and Product Managers focus on strategizing for the future of the product.
Regardless of your title and the organizational structure, find the time to be on the market rather than spending most of your time on the building side of the product. Problem-solving is a crucial skill in a PM as it is in every walk of life, but to be a superstar PM make sure to develop a Problem Finding mindset.
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