O. Who is a Product Manager?

“The phrase - jack of all trades, was originally used to describe playwrights in the medieval times who dabbled in a variety of skills to put out the best live theatre experience. The full phrase was “a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” is a hallmark of a Product Manager.”

For those getting started in Product Management, you may be wondering, what is a product and who is a Product Manager(PM). In my view, a product is just a means to an end or a scalable solution to a problem that can be shared by many people. In a society where time is more valuable than money, a good product makes people’s lives better. They can be either tangible/intangible, consumer, industrial, or service.

A common misnomer that goes around is that the product manager is the CEO of the product, which isn’t entirely wrong. But it doesn’t do justice to all the roles, responsibilities, intricacies, and nuances of what it takes to be a good value-adding product manager. Also, not to be confused with a program manager or a project manager who could be vastly different in their roles at different tech companies. So, who exactly is a product manager, and how does this role advance a company’s agenda of building and scaling new products in its portfolio?

During a conversation with my mentor last year, he used an analogy of how a product manager’s role is so much aligned in philosophy to that of an urban homesteader managing a piece of land, to take it from ideation to revenue, or a packet of seeds to organic food on the table. Clustering symbiotic solutions to provide them with an ideal climate to thrive using a data-driven approach is all you can do, eventually, the market gets to decide the success of your decisions and products. I’ve tried to put my product experience and intertwine it with my urban homesteading experience to find out how massively similar they indeed are in principle, which I will summarize at the end of the blog.

Image 2: Generic product classifications

Image 3: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - products addressing customers’ unmet needs by cbinsights.com

A PM’s primary goal is to empathize with the customers, define and prioritize their unmet needs, and align the product roadmap towards bridging those, all while keeping in mind how the product makes them feel, without trying to rationale with them. The customer’s feelings towards the product are neither right nor wrong, they just are which can change dynamically and it’s almost always a moving target. Much like a company’s valuation in the stock market, some can be explained with logic and others can’t justify its existence, either way, recalibrating to iterate by taking into account all the data points from user research and tracking success metrics, helps in getting to the root of the problem.

It takes an experienced PM to grasp this fundamentally and use these statistics judicially. Intrinsically, humans gravitate towards products that make them feel better and which comfort them aka painkillers, or they want to use a product proactively to avoid pain to be ahead of the game aka vitamin products or they want to use a product to blow off some steam aka candy products which could be seasonal.

In addition to these classifications, determining broadly which needs your product addresses the users in “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” is the first step toward Product Management. While these classifications can be too generalized and the answer could vary depending on whom you ask, all this does is create an originating point for a product genre which can be then segmented and extrapolated to develop a roadmap.

1. Introduction:

PMs are specialist dabblers and stakeholder managers who lead without authority and influence their vision for solving customer problems. The role does not necessarily require managing people but it is responsible for anything and everything resulting in the success or the failure of the product vertical. They align the company’s core beliefs, mission, and vision with user demand to follow customer-obsessed goals. They start defining the problem with people but scale with technology. If solving customer problems is a sport, PMs thoroughly understand the rules, and regulations and determine accurately what metrics and key performance indicators(KPIs) it takes to unify multiple teams and win the game.

Like a conductor of an orchestra, they marshal their team’s resources towards a North Start Metric. They understand the ebbs and flows of the product lifecycle, and they are always in love with the problem at any given stage, but never too attached to a solution because dynamically changing requirements demand a leader to stay nimble yet decisive with the end game to execute their vision having the best scenario in mind.

Collating various data sources from customer interviews, and past product releases and using their judgment, they define the most important problem using multiple prioritization techniques to tackle the next challenge. They understand fundamentally the need to optimize for only one feature at a time and adapt proactively to changing circumstances, competitors’ products, and global market trends to get the best bang for the buck with resources while thoroughly understanding the company’s value chain and their customer’s journey through the product.

So how do you measure a product manager’s success?

Credibility is the currency of the PM; unlike other roles in an organization, their work is less tangible and takes a substantial amount of time to ascertain whether their decisions and roadmap paid off or not. As a PM, the biggest measure of success will be the products they launch. While the mocks they drew, specs they wrote, bugs they triaged, or some meaningful metrics they defined are all appreciated; they’re recognized only on whether the product addressed the customer’s primary pain point or not.

Oftentimes, there isn’t a straightforward solution and there are risks with time, resources, and opportunity costs to solve customers’ problems. An experienced product manager is skilled at handling tradeoffs, doing user research, finding the ideal customers, following a true North Star Metric, and building a bulletproof Go-To-Market(GTM) strategy that mitigates any internal/external risks to guarantee product success.

At the end of the day, product management is a game of experimentation. You win some and lose some, but having a solid framework to find the right problem, building an optimal solution to the appropriate markets, and fine-tuning it along the way reduces risks and increases rewards.

Image 4: Top 5 skills needed for a successful product manager through my lens

 2. Does your team need a PM and approaches to Product Growth

The short answer is, that it depends based on the company’s mission, vision, product scale, scope, number of employees, lifecycle, budget, revenue, corporate culture, competitors, and a whole bunch of other factors. That being said, there are multiple strategies to run a company and scale products, there isn’t one optimal solution that fits all models, products, and markets. Each strategy has its pros, cons, and tradeoffs.

First up there’s Sales growth, where the product’s growth strategy is dependent on the sales processes and the sales/marketing teams contribute heavily to revenue growth. The marketing team could be independently driving the brand narrative and the future of the product depends on how well the sales team performs. In the best-case scenario, when you have top sales professionals who close deals on all the given leads it could be a blessing, but the downside is it doesn’t entirely factor in other aspects of the business like customer research and service, future product growth nor are they fully integrated with building the product which can result in fragmented effort replication across the funnel. In the future world with abundant choices, people purchase a product because of the value it brings to them, not because of flashy deals.

With a Product-led growth approach, the emphasis is on induced demand, meaning if you build it right, people will come. Interestingly enough in today’s market, the majority of the top tech companies in the S&P 500 and some unicorn startups are driven by product-led growth. PMs drive the company’s vision through their products to meet customer demands with a sequence of steps in the funnel through 7 stages.

Awareness, Acquisition, Adoption, Engagement, Retention, Monetization & Referrals with the primary goal of creating a stronger customer-focused product and solving their pain points through iterations and innovations. Based on the industry, company, and organization, there are multiple classifications and descriptions for a product manager which are used in aliases like Product Owner, Producer, Growth Product Manager, Technical Product Manager, Platform Product Manager, etc., The downside of this approach is the sheer amount of work needed to be aligned within and across the organization. Having a large scale and scope for the product makes this approach a necessity.

Then finally, there is founder-led growth, where a small team focuses heavily on solving technical problems through innovation driven by a visionary founder with groundbreaking technologies. There are only a handful of examples of successful execution of the founder-led sustained growth approach in the history of the tech industry. The greatest threat to these small teams is that they are too focused on a single person’s vision to change the world without any customer feedback loop setup and or too secretive to share their idea with the public until they launch. When the product hits the market, the product could very well be a technical marvel, but the solution might not entirely meet the customer demands due to a lack of the feedback loop, without a product market fit and market validation, it’s a steep challenge to scale these products.

While no single strategy can guarantee success, a hybrid approach titrated to meet organizational goals can help them find their sweet spot.

Image 5: Different approaches for product development and growth

 3. User Personas, Product vision and value, Competitive Analysis, Market Research & Technology Strategy

During the New Product Introduction (NPI) phase, there are multiple areas a PM needs to have clarity over before tackling the problem.

a) What are the core customer pain points, are we building a product that solves them, and is the solution in line with our vision?

b) Is there an existing solution, how many competitors exist in this segment? What’s the real value added for the customers?

c) Finally how big is this market opportunity? If we were to tackle this problem what’s the product vision & strategy for growth & scaling?

In the ideation stage, the PM becomes the collector of ideas, does competitive analysis and market research, and digs through previously validated frameworks, to define the vision for the future product based on what worked and how they can delight the customer in the next release based on the customer feedback. One of the hardest parts of this process is parsing all the data from multiple sources to form the right story and to determine whether or not it’s in line with your hypothesis.

More often than not, getting a straightforward response from a dataset with a binary yes or no is rare, but the solution lies in understanding and observing trends measured with probability after data cleaning, excluding data biases ranging from underfitting/overfitting, selection, exclusion, observer, measurement and racial biases. This is a critical step towards finding a future product market fit and whether it can satisfy the core customer demands. During the product brainstorming sessions, PMs lead the activity with a broad knowledge of market segments, finding the target segment, defining technology the stack in some cases, creating a unique value proposition(UVP), and estimating numbers for TAM, SAM, SOM using a variety of factors to define the scale and scope of the expected market opportunity.

4. Product Requirement Documents(PRDs) & Launching MVPs

An important stage in the product lifecycle is product ideation. PMs usually organize a platform to bring in all the stakeholders needed for the product origination. To sign off on the mutually agreed upon product’s value, purpose, and features and to get buy-in from across the stakeholders to align the vision of the product, PMs write and maintain an import document called the Product Requirements Document (PRD). Before the PRD comes into existence the PMs interact with the customers or with user research data to understand their fundamental needs, hands-pick a few of the ideas to find trends with a data-driven approach, and develop the idea to present it to the team. The PM creates a narrative with different user segments and depicts the solution in a story worth telling with feature prioritization based on effort/impact estimation or other prioritization frameworks. The solution that bubbles up to the top is the one that requires the least effort gets the most ROI and has a differentiating unique value proposition(UVP).

In the PRD, specifics about the product build will be mentioned including what features will be in and what won’t be built for the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). A lock-in date is set to determine the core features of the product which is to be built towards the MVP. A fail-fast strategy is commonly used to validate the product. This ideology helps get fast feedback from the market and rapidly inspect and adapt to customer demands. When dealing with products with high levels of uncertainty, it’s less expensive to start building an MVP and get quick market feedback. If it doesn’t work, kill it fast before more resources are spent salvaging them, or invest more if it shows signs of merit.

5. Road mapping, North Star Metrics, NPS, KPIs & OKRs

What gets measured, gets tracked, and improved, so how do you ascertain whether your product is progressing in the market or not, if it is then how do you improve and scale it? Well, that involves defining quantifiable success metrics.

The leading indicator of a product’s health and growth is the one true North Star Metric. Defining this metric judicially is key since the entire team works around the clock to better this metric and it’s the most predictive metric of the company's long-term success. Usually, there’s only one North Star Metric to define a product's success, but it can change over time based on the product and company’s life cycle. Then there are supporting proxy metrics which are lagging indicators of success in the other stages in the product funnel. The PM continuously tracks these metrics on a dashboard daily across all the stages observing any trends to fine-tune the product strategy and messaging.

NPS Net Promoter Score: Customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement is taken by asking customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others on a predefined rating scale.

Key Performance Indicators KPIs: They are the critical indicators of progress toward an intended result. KPIs provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision-making, and help focus attention on what matters the most.

Objective Key Results OKRs: They are an effective goal-setting and leadership tool for aligning the team’s vision and communicating succinctly what to accomplish and what milestones need to be reached to accomplish them.

While revenue is essential for business survival and growth, it’s usually a lagging indicator of how your product did in the market over some time, and often it isn’t particularly telling of what lies ahead for a company. Additionally using short-term tactics can be gamed for a short-term boost with long-term negative consequences, so using it as success metrics does not paint the full picture. In a product-led growth approach, the primary goal of a product is to address the core pain points of the customers which adds value to them to fuel more engagement and demand resulting in a snowball effect for generations to follow. This ideology is deeply rooted in a lot of hypergrowth companies that have had tremendous success using this model to scale products.

6. Wireframes, UI/UX design and prototypes

Any great PM understands the power of visualizations, if they can translate their imagination and vision into low or high-fidelity sketches, there is an imprint and a path to follow to explore the realm of all possibilities. There are many tools for low and high-fidelity designs, a few of my favorites are Figma, Canva & Balsamiq, if all fails, mock sketches to transfer your design thoughts on a paper napkin should work just fine.

Whether it’s a B2B or B2C product, understanding Gestalt principles and Dieter Ram’s Ten Principles of Good Design is key, to making the design intuitive, detailed, long-lasting, and easy to use and seamlessly integrate into a customer’s ecosystem should any exist. Of course, all of these wouldn’t be entirely built into the minimum viable product (MVP) right away, except if they were identified as critical functionalities. That’s where A/B testing is widely used for product optimizations, which refine the product to user preferences and responsiveness. Using all the available data, PMs then understand when to invest in innovation vs iteration, and when to build vs buying as they began to outline the prototypes based on the core competencies of the team and analyze several risk mitigation strategies both involving time and opportunity costs.

In a post-COVID era, there are newer and higher auxiliary product design standards. To name a few, it could be on the lines of sustainability, carbon neutrality, diversity, inclusion, fair wages, environmental impacts, and use of recycled materials which will define your product’s image. If your design doesn’t echo the user’s sentiments and considerations in your build, your products might be easily overlooked.

While the Product Design team would be mostly responsible for all of the design work, a PM should be aware of these requirements and course correct collaboratively if and when needed, to stay coherent with the product strategy and ethos to maintain the brand DNA while updating designs and fundamentally be aware of how the customer feels before and after interacting with it.

Image 9(gallery) : Gestalt 7 Principles of Design

7. Agile Methodologies, Scrum/Kanban and Sprint Planning

A PM could play the role of a Scrum Master if and when needed to organize Sprint planning using Scrum and Kanban rituals to manage product timelines. Some organizations could have their product managers in this dual role but that’s not the norm in the industry. As the saying goes ” if everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority", managing timelines is a critical bottleneck while developing a product, which in my view needs a specialist Program Manager and or a Project Manager who has perfected this craft of managing dependencies, facilitating backlog grooming, to break down tasks into issues and track progress on tickets raised depending on the scale and scope of the product.

A PM aligns the team’s vision, goals, and timelines with user stories across different stakeholders like R&D Technology, Business, Data Analytics AI/ML, and Product teams. While no product is free from hiccups along the way, timelines pushed out, resources getting cut, products not meeting numbers or specs, and any number of permutations and combinations between them, a PM is always on top of issues to mitigate risk, maximize rewards and tradeoff solutions to help put out fires and keep the team always moving towards the North Star Metrics.

8. Go-to-Market Strategy(GTM), Customer Acquisition & Retention

After having built a solution to the customer problem and it’s ready for take-off, now the success or failure of the product very much depends on the timing, placement, messaging, and prioritization of every feature of the product. GTM PMs build a bullet-proof Go-To-Market strategy which is paramount to helping users discover, engage, and take advantage of the product built for them. The strongest of products sold and adored around the world have mastered this craft before the product launch. But before taking the product to market, 4 fundamental questions need to be answered and accounted for to maximize the product’s outreach and growth.

Image 11: Go-To-Market(GTM) questions to ask

Does your product have Product Market Fit (PMF)? Are the target customers engaging, buying, using, and referring others to your product in numbers large enough to sustain organic growth and profitability? A variety of metrics such as NPS, churn rate, organic growth rate, and market share of the product give a good indication to validate whether a product has attained PMF.

Does your target audience connect with your messaging? Having a strong call to action to empower your customers and broadcasting a meaningful purpose or manifesto for building the product goes a long way for customers to start embracing and adopting your product.

Competitive demand translates to the question of whether your product has a unique value proposition(UVP) that other products don’t offer.

Are all the distribution channels being used to communicate and engage with the users to collect feedback for future iterations?

9. What does a PM bring to the table? 

This is straightforward to answer; a great PM brings favorable results to the table. Their ability to translate customer’s unmet needs into products, analyze revenue models, execute product strategy, evaluate global market demand, narrow down customer pain points, and come up with solutions using technology design helps them leverage anything and everything which the team needs from them, from Engineering, Business, Data, Product or alignment with vision and strategy, it’s truly an all-round position.

An experienced PM knows they are a wild card who can create widespread organizational impact with the products they bring to market, when equipped with the right skills and tenacity, the role can have a tremendous impact on the product reach, scale, scope, vision, and legacy of product for years to follow. This doesn’t mean PMs do all of the above at every stage of the product, but they have enough visibility, exposure, and ability to figure things out to prioritize paramount tasks at various stages in the product cycle, collaborating with stakeholders to get the best of all the teams involved and align the product vision and rally the organization to get the job done in the best interest of the customers.

Just remember behind every product you love and adore, behind every perfect-looking and tasting vegetable/fruit, behind every TV show and movie you are hooked on, there was tremendous innovation done behind the scenes with several iterations. Everything you saw, felt, and experienced was purely intentional by design, the scope of Product Management is truly far and wide across industries in the digital age.

Finally as promised, here’s what I started with, a piece of the barren empty junkyard, which now produces exotic tropical produce all year long.

Image 13(Gallery): What does taking a product from 0->1 look like philosophically

10. Summary:

A PM facilitates the growth of a product to its maximum potential by grouping symbiotic ideas. The entire Product Management journey is that of understanding customers’ unmet needs, data collection, risk evaluation & mitigation, experimenting, failing, iterating or innovating, and shipping Products, all to restart over and again with a new set of ideas which is an art perfected only by repetition.

Outro

By nature, plants and products reorient themselves towards and spread their roots in whichever direction they find resources, to put out maximum growth during their season, but when unmanaged they topple over unable to sustain long-term growth without any direction. In translation most teams in a company have conflicting goals by design, to bring out the best in each other, which when unmanaged could stifle adjacent teams competing against one another, and it’s a huge challenge to conclusively drive all their efforts towards one unique metric.

A great PM skillfully manages the product’s resources in a way where every team is constantly being over-communicated with and driving all their efforts towards one true North Star Metric so that each one of the team members is fighting hard to solve customer problems to keep the product’s goals aligned with the company’s mission. They stay nimble with changing market demographics and dynamically keep updating and communicating KPIs and OKRs throughout the lifecycle of the product with changing customer demands.

They are not only comfortable being in the grey but excited about what challenges tomorrow brings, always looking forward to the next big problem to solve with a great deal of customer empathy, because the customer is always king and a company’s sole existence should be nothing less than to delight its customers by solving their pain points, which in turn reflects their place, growth & positioning in the open market.

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