8 Product Management Hacks
To be more effective
Our world changes ever faster. Technological developments push the boundaries of a product. What is hot now may be outdated next year. To be on top of things, here are 8 hacks for any Product Manager.
Accept you can’t predict the future
Most great product ideas don’t come to fruition. Only a few bring the value you hoped for. Product Managers may have good reasons to assume an idea will be highly successful. But in ever-changing environments, the expected value is no more than an indication.
To find out what the actual merit of a product idea is, limit your investments to proving the potential before making heavy investments. Example: The Lean Startup
Keep it simple
To work towards creating great products of value in an ever-changing environment, keep things simple. It doesn’t make sense to add all kinds of bells and whistles to your products before you know if it is worthwhile to spend any more money on this promising but unverified product feature.
Firstly, you are making more investments than needed to verify the feature. Secondly, you are making the verification of the feature value too complex. When customers respond negatively to the new feature, they may actually refer to the extras and not to the actual thing you wish to have verified. The additional bells and whistles can be part of the next iteration when they are top of the list to build next.
Accept you don’t know everything
The scope of a Product Manager is gigantic. It spans the complete product experience. Others know better how to
design effective UX
build the product
support the product
support the users
sell the product
keep an eye on the finance
Etcetera
On top of that, a Product Manager needs to address the complete lifecycle of a product, from discovery to the end of life.
An effective Product Manager collaborates with others and relies upon others to make the best decisions in their field.
Work towards outcome
When you can’t predict what the future will bring, you also can’t predict what exactly you need to build to achieve your goals. An effective Product Manager works towards the desired outcome. This is about setting goals as a north star for everyone involved in creating value (people who build the product, internal and external stakeholders, users and customers).
There are different ways to determine your goals and assess if you are heading in the right direction. Examples are Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Evidence-Based Management and the North Star Framework.
Avoid the feature factory trap
There’s no automatic connection between generating output and the desired result. You can’t simply build and deploy features based on thorough analysis (only). Building features with the expectation that they bring value is dangerous.
Even though many product managers have outcome-based goals, they still rely too heavily on estimates of the expected value of the features the teams create. They seem to have forgotten to rely on the actual outcome instead.
Foster a learning culture
When you don’t know what will bring the highest value, you need to try things out and learn from the experiment. This requires a learning culture, which can impact everyone involved in the product sphere. Everyone working on the product experience and also your (potential) users need to understand and embrace the fact that you are on a value discovery
A learning culture relies on building trust. Finding out that something doesn’t work as expected isn’t a failure. It’s a step closer to understanding what works instead. It helps everyone involved to make a well-informed decision on what to do instead next. This can range from trying something else, staying on the path or even abandoning the product altogether, avoiding unnecessary investments.
Foster collaboration
Everyone involved in creating value needs to work together. Typically, multiple teams work on different aspects of the product which need to work together seamlessly. This includes items like customer support, sales and operations. To allow everyone to paint and have the complete picture, collaboration is key.
One or multiple teams can foster collaboration by working towards the same goal and having regular alignment. Stakeholders (internal or users/customers) can be part of - regular check-ins like the Sprint Reviews in Scrum to assess progress towards the mutual goal.
Including stakeholders is often an Achilles heel. The notion of the importance of regular collaborative sessions to discuss progress to value is missed by many Product Managers. Without these check-ins, understanding the overall progress towards the goal is nearly impossible.
Measure and learn
Regularly measure your progress towards your goal and learn from these assessments. Predefined value estimates are worthless when the product hits the real world. So, measure actual value.
Here are examples of metrics to use to measure actual value:
number of active users
happiness of the users
market share
revenue generated
The list of possible metrics is endless. The key is finding out for yourself what you find important.
Wrap up
These are 8 effective Product Management hacks. If some of them are new to you, try them out! If you have experience with one or more of these hacks, what are your experiences? And do you perhaps know other hacks? Let me know in the comments!
Original article Jan 2024