The Product Manager Handbook compiled by Carl Shan and designed by Brittany Cheng is a compilation of conversations of the author with ten product managers from companies including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter.
This book is a good and a quick read for anyone aspiring to work in the Product space. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and understanding the perspective of different people in the area of product management.
The book begins with “How to get a job as a Product Manager” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell and Jackie Bavaro. This piece however is targeted to College graduates. Gayle and Jackie present a framework consisting of Leadership, Analytical and Data Skills, Technical Skills, Initiative, Product Design Skills and Customer Focus and finally Strong Work Ethic. This framework is useful to approach building relevant experience needed to become a Product Manager. For example, having a good GPA shows that you are consistent and have a good work ethic, and doing side projects shows Initiative.
I have summarized the insights that I gathered from the book into four sections.
Roles and Responsibilities of a Product Manager
To help the team build the best product possible through prioritizing what to work on, helping design beautiful user experiences, guiding engineering to avoid roadblocks while leaving them autonomous and working with all other parts of the organization to provide transparency and input into the product development process.
The PM should ensure that the team is building the right product, with the right set of priorities, in a manner consistent with company goals, while constantly advocating for the user.
To have an understanding of the product at a very intimate level, which means understanding how people interact with the product to a very deep degree, their understanding of the product, their goals and frustrations.
To identify real world problems and to come up with ways to solve them.
To have a deep understanding of the market and the customer.
Help your team decide the best way to spend their time and resources on a project and keep everyone pumped along the way.
The PM needs to influence without authority. This can be achieved by building very strong one-on-one relationships with each of the teammates on the project and throughout the Organization.
The PM is the coordinator, not the boss of the people that she is working with. Go into the role with confidence and humility.
To motivate people using Product Vision.
It is important for a PM to have Product Sense. This can be developed through an extreme attention to detail.
Diligence is another responsibility of being a PM. The product you build is a reflection of you and the effort you put into it. It is important to be honest with yourself, your team and your work.
Skills needed to become a Product Manager
Technical Skills: Technical Understanding is essential as it allows the PMs to make good tradeoffs as they understand engineering costs. They can make better decisions about what will return the greatest benefit with least costs and how to build MVPs (minimum viable products).
Analytical Skills: It is important for PMs to be data-informed. It is important to look at how people use the product, brainstorm ideas and measure the performance of the features, releasing what does well and killing what doesn’t.
Design skills: Ability to prototype, wireframing (using tools like visio and balsamiq), understanding of the fundamental UX principles and design and JavaScript.
Organization skills: Organization is the key to success. Organizing thoughts, questions and to-dos can instill trust in the team to get things done without any oversight.
Communication: PMs work most closely with the development teams, marketing, design and management. Their special sauce is the ability to understand and communicate with a wide variety of people who speak different languages.
Thought leadership: To have a solid understanding of the product and industry, and having a clear and passionate vision for where you want your product to go.
Simplify: Ability to develop the simplest solution to a problem. Ex: Marissa Mayer, a product manager at Google who kept the Google home page simple and clean despite the immense pressure to leverage its traffic for other Google properties.
Preparation for the Product Manager role
It is important to have answers to the following three questions.
Why are you interested in Product Management?
What skills can you leverage from your existing experience?
How would you contribute to the team right off from the start?
Spend a lot of time learning about the product, being an avid user of the product and to look at the product landscape to understand its scope and scale.
First steps as a New Product Manager
Schedule one-on-one meetings with team members. Ask them their goals and challenges.
To maximize your learning and growth, it is important to shadow other folks on the product team - PMs, designers and engineers. Understanding how people work will help figure out how to be effective.
Research what the product has been in the past - Understand how the team got to where it is today. What was the MVP version of the product? It will show what has been prioritized in the past and how the team is thinking today.
Check out the past A/B tests to understand how certain hypotheses worked or failed.
It is valuable to look at the product’s historical metrics to see how they have been growing over time.
Start talking to users!
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