I always loved product management. Thinking about what
others want is such a selfless feeling.
It is not a natural instinct for everyone. It is tough,
human beings are designed to be egoistic.
Product management is like a right drink, alcohol(Technical
skills),water(Business acumen) and ice(User experience).Product management follows S Curve and includes product
development(Microphone as inbound) and product marketing(Speaker as outbound).
Microphone activities include customer research/feedback,
trend analysis, competitive analysis, and development.Speaker activities are feedback, distributing marketing
messages, training sales people and engagement team, brand promotion strategies.
Sitting in room and believing what customer wants didn’t
work well for many companies. This might be the reason why startup became beast
enough to swallow big corporate products.So now let us think about the small boat, does startup
require product management team?Are the co-founders smart enough to figure out what product
needs? The answer can be yes, if one of the co-founders is a product guy!That also means startup needs a product guy.
Product
management should simmer the boundary with other disciples like sales,
development and customer engagement.It needs complete involvement from the whole company so that
right signals are passed to product team.
What it takes to make a great product management in your
startup?
Start from top:
Everyone in the startup should believe that product management is very
important.
Don’t forget gut feelings comes from gut neither brain nor heart.
Even CEO has to listen to what product management team says!This also means all the decision makers should have “product
guy” qualities defined below.
Audience Discovery:
Sometimes startup lose focus because proper audience discovery is not done.
The product management should discover the audience and
understand their needs in depth.Build persona and write down the what they want to do.You have to metamorphous to a “Black Swan” and it needs
practice.
Don’t love your
product: Product management team should not get obsessed. Don’t build a
product you want.Build a product customer wants. This falls back into
Audience discovery and understanding
their needs.
Process is a garbage
collector: In product management focus and methodological approach is very
important.But do you need elaborate process ?. The answer is no, use
process as a garbage collector.Use it as a tool for focus. Whenever you feel some task takes
away your focus add a process to do that.Also add process when you feel anybody should be able to do
the task.
Put the team into
focus: Product guy is the “NO” guy not the “YES”. When bunch of passionate
people brain storm over new feature lot of opinions surfaces.Looking deep into facts and doing the right thing for the
customer is “must” for product management.
Fear of failure:
As a product manager fear of failure can prevent you from doing the right
thing. ”Fixing Fast” is more important than doing it right first time.Build your team around this.
Core Fans:
Identify the core fans of your product. Best way to identify your core fan is
to look at the data you collected about usage.This is as important to remember that this group is the
right audience you discovered. Core fans can really accelerate your brand
value.They are the ambassadors and see value in your product. They
will pay for your product. Core fans also knows how handicapped your product
is.Listen to them.
Continuous feedback:
The importance of feedback is spoken a lot about but how many companies does
make it actionable. And sometimes startup over react to the feedback derailing
the product.
The right balance is the most important job of product
management.
Most of the above point is applicable for all companies.
So what you think is the right thing happening in your
startup w.r.t product management?
