My First Year as a Product Manager: The Four Lessons Learned
Product Management is a very complicated role. Sure, it has its rewards & if done well, the feeling of accomplishment can bring intense satisfaction. But, it is impossible to excel as a Product Manager from the very beginning.
No matter how many articles you read, videos you watch, or mock interviews you take, you’ll definitely make mistakes when you step into the real world & deal with real products i.e. products you’ll own.
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new- Albert Einstein
I’ve made my share of mistakes as well & in this article, I'll talk about the lessons I learned from them.
Let’s begin…
Problem-focused approach > Solution-focused approach
Yes, this is a very common & talked about problem & yes, I fell prey to it as well. As a new PM, I was always excited to be a part of great teams & start my work. But here’s the thing, my perception of ‘work’ was building solutions as quickly as possible to be not identified as a slow learner.
But that’s a grave mistake.
When I was at Shiprocket, I was asked to improve the mobile checkout experience since we were noticing major dropoffs on the checkout funnel, most of which were in the first step i.e. collecting OTP to verify the customer’s phone number.
I talked to a couple of customers about this & their immediate reaction was to exclude the OTP verification step. So, as a naive intern, I immediately suggested that it’d be better to exclude the OTP flow & take the customers directly to the shipping details step. The senior PM who was my reporting manager told me that I’d just learned my first lesson, which was jumping to solutionize for a problem that is not the actual problem in the first place.
I started talking to customers again, the difference was that this time I asked “why” multiple times. After the second round of discussions, I realized the key problem was psychological i.e. they were curious about the benefits of sharing & verifying their phone numbers. That's when I suggested providing all the value propositions that Shiprocket offered with their checkout product.
The result? A 15% reduction in dropoffs.
Responsive design is critical
Whether it’s an e-commerce website or a SaaS application, responsive design practice is key to creating an optimized user experience. You want your users(especially DAU) to have the best experience whether they’re accessing your platform on a laptop or a mobile browser.
When I joined Swift as an APM, initially I’d put a lot more focus on the UX of web users since it was a B2B platform & I assumed most users would access the app with their laptops. But I’d get a lot of queries for the mobile UX from our front-end team, where a button would be placed, how will the positioning look like & such. Out of curiosity, I looked at our GA stats to find out that almost 55% of our users accessed our platform in their mobile browsers.
Thankfully, our frontend team were masters at their craft & would take responsive design into account but after that discovery, I started to carefully look at wireframes & design to create a more responsive experience.
Fun fact: Google offers a mobile responsive test to check how mobile-friendly your website is
Taking breaks is a good thing
Most people preach productivity nowadays & therefore try to complete their daily work without any breaks in between. More work= More value. In fact, I’ve seen people gobbling up their lunch just because they want to do more in a day than expected of them & I've done that too. But it’s not healthy, not for your body or your mind.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, taking breaks is a good thing. Research has proved that taking breaks in between:
- Improves focus
- Improves performance
- Improves creative thinking
- Lowers stress levels
Think of it like a HIIT(High-Intensity Interval Training) program. In HIIT, you have to do an intense cardio session to increase your heart rate followed by a brief recovery session to bring it back to normal. Similarly, you can follow a HIIT process(add some caffeine to it☕) to fire up your neurons for a couple of hours of focused work followed by a brief productivity-inducing break.
Product value > the product
It took me quite a long time to realize that customers try a product simply because they think it will solve their problem & will deliver value to them. And when it does, they tend to stick around. So, even though your title is “Product” manager, your focus should be creating/optimizing the value that your product provides.
Let’s take Uber as an example:
- Do customers care about the product? No, they care about the value the product is providing to them i.e. an efficient commute solution
- Do they care about the design? No, unless it’s being used by a PM or a designer themselves, what matters to them is how quickly can they achieve that value i.e. booking rides in a click(well, a few clicks but you get my point)
- Do they care about the technologies it uses(API’s for maps, payments, ML for optimizing routes, estimating arrival times, etc.)? Again, unless you’re a PM or a tech geek or just uber curious(pun intended😛), what matters to them is how quickly they can reach their destinations, how easily they can pay & check arrival times etc.
Takeaway
- It’s very natural to make mistakes in the early stages of your career, in Product Management, it's almost guaranteed to make some. But the important thing is to learn from them.
- You’ll have a mentor/manager to guide you in your initial years, so it's very important to soak in all the valuable insights you get from these people.
- Try to document or keep a record of what you did wrong so that you don't do it again or make sure it doesn’t become a repeating habit.
That’s all for today folks. Here are my previous articles if you want to explore more.
Penpal will return.
Fin👋🏻
