The role of a product manager is a rewarding one, even if it's not always glamorous. You're busy balancing the opinions and priorities of different departments, trying to keep everyone on the same page while maintaining ambitious timelines. Still, despite these challenges, seeing a new product or variation on a feature launch into the real world from the ideation stage to the sitting-on-a-shelf stage is incredibly satisfying.
It requires a unique set of skills to be a successful product development manager. You need to be an effective communicator, be able to juggle many responsibilities, be highly organized, and be a visionary. As the product development manager, you often feel like you're running your own entrepreneurship within a bigger company. It's a large responsibility, and with it comes some consistent headaches that can be alleviated with the proper support and specialized tools. Here are seven stressors that most product managers face and how to make them fade into the background.
Sticking to the Plan
Many product managers who have years of experience under their belts will rely on their intuition and instinct when making decisions during the development process. When you have repeated success, it often leads to relying on your gut rather than planning effectively until you reach a scenario where your hunch is wrong. Instead of gambling with success and failure, you can use a strategic roadmap to help you keep your team on track for your goal with evidence backing you up.
Feeling Outnumbered
It can be lonely and frustrating in the position of product manager. Your role is an essential one. You are the glue that binds many moving pieces together in a large company. You often work in tandem with the designers, engineers, manufacturers, and marketers, all while reporting back to the VP of Operations or another VP. We like to think of you as the quarterback of your company. While you may feel like an outnumbered player, you are the most valuable member. This is why you need a product roadmap management tool that helps you thrive in your role.
Miscommunication
As the person who coordinates many other departments, it can be challenging to keep everyone informed. It can also be stressful to get up-to-date information from each department on a schedule you've created. It often feels like everyone is reporting to you with no interaction with each other. While you may give it your best effort, it's incredibly challenging to deliver information from one department to the next in real-time without a tool to facilitate that communication. The Gocious product management tool enables the smooth flow of information so every branch of your company can provide updates and quickly see the progress in the other areas.
Unrealistic Deadlines
Another factor in coordinating several departments is that the expected timelines don't always line up realistically. The design department may set a deadline that the engineers or manufacturers cannot meet, which means the launch plan will be delayed without talking to everyone involved. If only you had a place where everyone could work together to coordinate their piece of the puzzle to create an acceptable and realistic timeline for the product... Gocious facilitates timeline collaboration with accessible dashboards and target tracking for efficiency and transparency.
Diplomacy
Developing a product involves several different teams. Often, one phase of development relies on completing another step in advance. The team leads for each phase don't always see eye to eye on where the priority should lie. Sometimes the difficulty sits with management and their expectations for the production process. As the product development manager, it's up to you to listen to management's directions and communicate those effectively to the rest of your team to mediate.
It can also be your responsibility to help the executives understand which targets are achievable and which ones are unrealistic. It's not easy being a diplomat, but with the right tools at your fingertips, you can have the data and evidence to back up your arguments, plus a platform to facilitate ongoing communication in real-time.
Not Having the Right Tools for the Job
When you don't have the right tools to do your job efficiently, you spend a lot of valuable time repeating actions, tracking down answers, and "doing" tasks rather than strategizing. It would help if you had more than documents, spreadsheets, and basic task managers. You need powerful software specifically designed for planning, tracking, and managing product lines.
Gocious is the tool designed specifically for you, the product manager. The features, the usability, the reporting, and the display were all designed with your needs in mind. You can plan out product roll-outs years in advance and display the progress for all relevant departments. If you've been longing for software that helps you perform your job better, talk to your supervisor about using Gocious for your teams.
Feeling Undervalued
You love the rewards of your job, but you also feel the pressure and the stress. You need to ensure the production schedule is on time and that all stakeholders are informed. On some days, everything can go smoothly, while others can feel strained and stressed. When you're the lone figure in charge, it can be easy to feel ignored or undervalued by your executives. You may feel pressured to work extra long hours without receiving recognition or compensation for your commitment.
Product managers often feel like they need more support. Having the right tools for the job can save a significant amount of time, stress, and money. The trouble is, there aren't many tools out there that can support the complex work of the product manager. That's the primary reason why we created Gocious. We wanted to alleviate the struggle of juggling data, KPIs, communication, reporting, and timeline scheduling and compile all those tasks into one clean, easy-to-use dashboard that works well for everyone involved in product creation and product management.
Your Roadmap to Success
Product management is all about strategic, long-term planning. With physical products, new features don't get rolled out overnight. It takes many months and years to coordinate new ideas, technology, or aesthetic choices. Plotting all the milestones on an easy to view and edit roadmap can have a huge impact on how well you manage the product development process. At Gocious, we love innovation, which is why we are continuously adding new features and tweaking our design to make your work and life easier.
The Dream Software for Product Managers
If these headaches resonate with you, let’s talk about Gocious Product Roadmap Management Software. Not only can we make your job easier, but we can also save your entire team stress, time, and money.
