What Do You Know?
One thing a career in Product Management has taught me is that there is no single, consistent definition of Product Management roles and responsibilities. At smaller companies, for example, Product Management is often charged with ownership of work that would be distributed across Product Managers, Product Marketers, Program Managers, Product Owners and others at larger companies. So just what you’re asked to do in a Product Management job at any given company — or even at any given moment — will vary. And in truth, that variety represents a big part of the role’s appeal for many Product Management professionals.
But while the specifics of what a PM professional owns will vary, I’d argue that what they need to know to do their job well is pretty constant. This is a blog, not a textbook, but here’s my list of what PM professionals need to have their heads firmly around to do their job well:
The market. Simply put, without a deep understanding of the market, you will struggle to do meaningful Product Management work. You need to know who buys your products, what problems they buy them to solve, why those problems are important, and how big they are. You need to know what alternatives are out there, including doing nothing, direct alternatives to your products, and indirect alternatives. And you need to know why people choose your products instead of those alternatives. Which takes us to…
The sales process. Without a solid understanding of the commercial side of your business, you can’t be effective at enabling that part of the business, and PMs are forever getting sucked into that role. You need to know how your customers buy, how they arrive at a buying decision, and by extension what help your sales team needs from the Product team to win business in a scalable process.
Customer success factors. Once you’ve closed a deal, it’s imperative to make customers successful with what you’ve sold them, particularly if you’re working in a subscription model rather than a traditional licensing model. Without knowing what makes customers successful with your product (and for that matter what’s likely to make them less likely to succeed), you’re likely to struggle with renewals. You need to know how your organization onboards customers and makes them successful, and help them get better at it where you can, including with product changes. You need to understand what works well in this process and what doesn’t work as well, where the opportunities for improving the efficiency of the organization as a whole lie, and what factors will tend to lead a customer towards a renewal vs. a cancelation.
The user. Moving past the buying and onboarding process we get to the most important people for your product — the users (who may or may not be the same people as the buyers). Without knowing your users and precisely what they are trying to do, you will struggle to serve them well. Know who uses your products and how — and in significant detail. Know what value they’re getting from the product, as well as what the value they’re not getting but would like to. Know that value is the operative word, here. Product Management professionals often think in terms of features and capabilities, and that’s just not enough. To best decide where to invest you need to see past coolness of the capabilities you can conceive of and deliver to the value and impact those capabilities will bring to the people who have to use them to do a job.
The product. If you don’t know your product inside-out, you will struggle to make the right recommendations about everything from the strategy and roadmap to simple triage or design decisions. You need to know it cold. What it does, how it works, how it’s put together, how it fits with your company’s broader portfolio, how it integrates with other products (internal or 3rd party), and much more.
Your company. Your broader business and what your company is trying to achieve provide the context for all of the decisions a Product Management professional makes. Without an understanding of what your company is really all about, you may struggle to stay aligned with the overall needs of the business. Work to understand how you make money as a business, and your product facilitates that revenue creation. Pay attention to the objectives of the business, the portfolio strategy (if there is one) and how it supports those objectives, and ensure that your product strategy supports those goals.
All of these insights take effort to acquire. They require time with customers, time with peers, time with your product, time doing research, and time digesting what you’ve learned and making connections between the data points you’ve gathered.
None of this speaks to the skills needed to do the day-to-day work of Product Management — that’s a post for another day. But all the Product Management experience and talent in the world won’t help you be successful if you haven’t built the base of knowledge needed to drive your decisions and actions.
Thanks for reading.
