How to Position Yourself as a Strong Product Manager From the Get-Go: Part 3
Part 3: Go beyond communication: have a strong collaboration
Alongside my previous discussions around adopting a user-centric approach to Product Management and leveraging data to make informed decisions, my final key area of discussion is collaboration. In Product Management collaboration is fundamental to success. Here are my top tips for Junior Product Managers looking to make a difference.
Build your roadmap with the team
Focus on what I call internal communication, meaning, with your core team. With the product team. With the engineers, designers, data scientists who are working on your product. You all play a key role in the success or failure of the product, and you should all feel the same commitment to growing the NSM.
As Marty Cagan says:
“If you use your engineers to code, you are using only half of their potential”
This means that engineers must be included in strategy work, this is key if you want to reach your goals faster. Remember you are a team and you all work for the success of the end-users, not to develop features and to please stakeholders.
Present your user research/product discovery to the team regularly as well as the product NSM update. When creating the roadmap include the designer and (at least) the tech lead — and make sure they are actively participating in crafting the product strategy. As a PM you should empower and make the engineers and designer aware that the overall team is responsible for the roadmap and consequently the user’s success. They bear as much responsibility for growing the NSM as the PM does.
Therefore, communication alone is not enough, you need to create a collaboration environment, where the strategy is crafted by the product trio (PM, designer, tech lead). (Torres: Continuous Discovery Habits, 2021)
Understand your peers’ personalities
To make sure that the team has the opportunity to participate in the strategy work, as a PM you need to know that we all have different communication and personality. When planning a strategy/ roadmap discussion, allow every team member to have enough time to prepare for it.
To understand the most efficient way to talk, work and be successful with your teammates, I suggest using the 16 personalities test. This helped me significantly to understand that the way I function, communicate, think and work, could be 180° degrees opposite to what my tech lead is, and that’s why we cannot work seamlessly together. Therefore, if you want to build more trust with your team, and get more out of them, adapt your style to help the team shine even more.
This is my personality!
By learning the basics of User-centricity, Data analytics and Communication, you are going to be able to position yourself faster as a strong Product Manager. Consequently, your users will become more engaged and successful in their desired outcome, and you will become indispensable for your team.
Final key takeaways to fasten your learning:
This is the last article of a collection of three. Find the previous articles on User-Centricity (XX here) and how to be Data-Aware (XX here)
Do’s
User-Centricity
- Think about what happens before, during, and after the user perform a job related to your product
- Create functional, emotional and social jobs
- Be precise (X minutes) when noting pains and gains
- Prioritise jobs, pains and gains by severity
- Connect your different value proposition with the customer profile
Data Analytics
- Use the North Star Metric as your go-to-metric framework
- NSM must be able to: lead to revenue, measure progress, reflect customer value
- Compare period-over-period (i.e., week-over-week) to understand the impact of your experiments
Communication
- The PM is only part of a team. Use your team to build the strategy
- Stress to the product trio that you are all equally responsible for the success of the product
- Collaboration > Communication
- Everyone is different (thank god) use the 16 personality test to improve your team productivity
Thank you for your time 🚀 and do not hesitate to share any feedback with us!
Tizano
