How to Succeed in Product Management

Product management is a balancing act—between vision and execution, agility and strategy, stakeholder demands and user needs. Yet, even the most experienced product managers fall into common traps that challenge product success.

From founders building based on assumptions to agile chaos that sacrifices strategy for speed and rigid roadmaps that no one follows, these pitfalls are more common than we’d like to admit. If you’ve ever struggled with feature prioritisation, stakeholder conflicts, or delivering real user value, you’re not alone. In this post, we’ll break down the three biggest product management mistakes—and, most importantly, how to avoid them.

The Ideal Product Manager

Not every company has the same notion of product management. Basically, work culture is made from experiences and memes. Developers, managers and product people themselves mix up a bandwidth of ideas what product managers should do. The most common are:

• Prioritise features based on user needs and business goals

• Align cross-functional teams consisting of devs, designers, a manager, analysts, and a product person

• Produce a product vision, or at least some requirement specs

• Talk to customer, users, partners and other stakeholders

• Interprete the feedback from those

• Draw a product roadmap

• Having market oversight

• Communicate why something should be build to the team and, potentially, to the whole company

• Defend decisions against executives and customers

• Analyse and measure the success of certain features, including A/B tests and alike

• Drive other experiments such as designing mocks, conduct demos ("MVPs")

Those are so many traits that the fraction of PMs are hard to find who are capable, willing, and mandated to practice all of them frequently.

The Role of a Product Manager is Schizophrenic

It's not only the bandwidth of expected function that a PM is expected to perform, but also kind of leadership and work process. A few years ago, there was the idea that PMs should be "miniature CEOs", which means that due to their edge in understanding customer and user needs, they could decide better than anyone what to build. No matter what executives are saying, you, as PM, have the better arguments and, of course, you can also take full responsibility for your decisions. The actual CEO might set impulse, but the PM creates a vision for her/his part of the product development and is also mandated to ignore opinions from whomever.

Yet, this high standard contradicts with many ideas of modern engineering and general organisations:

• CEOs have the actual responsibility and ultimately cannot direct them fully to PMs. Of course, there's a trust relationship, but in the end, the reporting lines are clear.

• Typically, goal setting is supplemented of Objectives and Key Results. There are strategic ones and some that are important for the considered time frame of a quarter up to a year. Whatever the PM sets as OKRs for her/his part of the organisation has to align.

• In agile or whatever a teams pictures it's method, decisions are taken jointly

Additionally, there are other contradictions such as between building a roadmap and deciding after every Sprint or based on new analytics data. Not to forget that you need to deal with many different stakeholders pulling on you and having interest in what features are needed, what issues they face using the product, or how a conversion performs due to the decisions that you have taken in the past. Just have a look at the reddit survey that indicates what critical effect such uncertainty has on a PM's mental health.

How to Become a Successful Product Manager

To become a successful product manager, you must find your way through the jungle of branches of decision making. We at Castspells.io recommend to keep relaxed and practice a couple of techniques to stay sane in whatever storm your company go through:

1. Try to trace your decision making. Write down your assumptions, connected them what you do to validate them (interviews, experiments, mocks, MVPs) and map out insights.

2. Help your organisation to run a proper OKR process and align with it. This enables you to be clear about what your measure effect can be and to not take responsibility of things you don't have under control. Also make your OKRs a team thing. Whatever the devs decide to do must be mapped to the KRs, otherwise they go rouge.

3. Make the attempt to measure or proof your performance. Demonstrate how many new insights your have generate or where you removed uncertainty. Ultimately, this is the outcome of every PM's efforts.

All in all, producing artefacts like PRDs as a PM is not the whole truth. Generally, all gears of an organisation follow their specific processes and the fluency with which the process runs and the outcomes need to be measured, which always have been hard in product management. Make the step and you'll be outperforming those who deny this simple fact.