Good Product Manager Series: Best practices of good PMs
This is part II of the Good Product Manager Series that I started writing a couple of weeks ago. Its mostly inspired by the conversations I have had with various companies, incubators, accelerators across the country in the past couple of months.
These articles and conversations are not startup focused, they are product focused. Its your job to figure out what of this is relevant to the stage of company you are in, and how to adjust it so its most effective. All I am trying to do is write out certain things that have worked for me (and those who I admire) while building product across great companies like Google and Motorola.
So here is the top 10 list of Product Management best practices. No particular order or priority, consider it a brain dump. As you can imagine, its all a walk in the park :)
- Product management is the art of leadership but from the front, back or the middle depending on what your team needs. So please do not assume you have to always be the one forging a path for your team. Sometimes your team needs an inspirational leader, other times it needs an enabler who focuses on supporting the visionary. So decide what role your team needs you to play for it to succeed, and then mould yourselves into that. I have personally messed this up a few times in my career.
- Do whatever it takes. A good PM will end up doing program management, scripting, wireframing, working with legal/operations, cleaning the floors, bringing in the food/drinks, you get the drift. Sometimes all of the above in the course of single day! A good PM does whatever it takes to launch a product. Period. Have no ego around any kind of work. Nothing is above or beneath you.
- Plan, plan and replan. A good PM is an amazing program manager too. She will spend a lot of time creating detailed plans and timelines and meticulously track their progress. She will be the one person in the team who is always on top of all aspects of the project. Good PMs are obsessively paranoid and eternally optimistic. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
- Focus on the troika. Engineering, Design and Product Management. That’s the troika that makes most software products work in today’s world (of course there are other stakeholders, the principle of inclusion is the same though). A good PM ensures all three have a seat at the table and that their opinions are heard. They involve all key stakeholders in every aspect of product development. A good PM also understands that its best to the let the knowledge experts make decisions in their areas. So learn to listen to your design lead and engineering lead.
- You are married to engineering. Your success and failure depends on the hard work of the engineers working with you (not for you). Your job is not to merely write PRDs and hand them instructions on what to build. Your job is collaborate with engineering to figure out the absolute best product that can be built. So yes, you will provide direction and guidance, but you will also incorporate a lot of direction and guidance from your engineering partner. A great Engineering — Product chemistry is one consistent theme across the world’s great product companies today.
- Be decisive. Ok, well this might be a personal bias more than an observation. Good PMs decide. They make calls, they do not sit on the fence for too long. Teams look to product managers to make hard decisions. So decide. Sometimes you will be wrong, many times you will be right. Its ok to be wrong, and launch and iterate, rather than sit around with analysis-paralysis.
- Use Data. Initial calls can be intuitive or data driven. But ultimately it needs to be backed up with data. Good PMs are champions of data in the organization. They ensure we instrument everything, collect everything, and then more importantly, use that data to drive decisions. A good PM is the best friend of a data/Analytics org.
- Build a communication map of the team. Before one does a lot of strategy work and start influencing the direction of the company, a good PM puts together a great communication map of the team. This includes who is making decisions, how are they being made, where are the dependencies, how are they broken, how are we tracking goals and how are they measured and revised. I wrote a post on this a few months ago. I recommend reading it. This is so important because a lot of good thoughtful product work is useless when done on a base of a company that does not know to how to streamline its communication map.
- This applies to almost every function but key enough that its worth mentioning. Hire well. Hire better than you. Someone wise told me once, A people hire A+ people and win big. B people hire C people and breed mediocrity. Always hire better than yourselves. The first thing to do in any setup is to streamline the hiring process to be amazing. Every single B player who joins your company ultimately pulls it down.
- You are the voice of the user in the company. A good PM always takes decisions based on what’s best for the user. This seems simple but is so hard to practice in real life. Focusing on the user and what’s good for them is the only rubric you should use to make decisions. Seriously complex calls become very simple when the gold standard for decision making is what is good for the user. In real life, its easy to get bogged down with goals, deliverables, politics etc that plague all organizations. But focusing on the end user (and this user can be a consumer, enterprise whatever) is the only way to have clarity of thought.
Bonus point: Good PMs do a lot of shitty work behind the scenes. You work hard to buffer the team from the larger politics in the company, from bad decisions, you fight tough battles and try to create a setup where your engineering team can go build big without distractions. A good PM takes on a lot of noise to ensure the team is able to build greatness. Because ultimately the biggest validation for a Product Manager is a great product that makes its users happy and its creators proud.
Good Product Managers are rarely universally popular, the same is true for good leaders btw. Ultimately, the greatest in this profession manage to do all this with such great emotional intelligence that they are actually amazingly effective and universally popular. They go on to do some amazing things in life. A prime example of this is Google’s Sundar Pichai. Now that’s one hell of a good PM.
(let me know if you see errata or if I missed something)
