Why I'm a Product Manager

I started my career in the front lines of customer service, from the age of 15 I was helping frantic customers in both retail and call centre environments.  It's one of the most valuable experiences I've had simply because it taught me that:

  • the customer is not always right - but that doesn't mean they're wrong
  • listening is the most important thing when it comes to understanding your customers needs
  • treating people well and doing the right thing makes your customers loyal - and makes them spend more money in the long run!
  • "doing the right thing" doesn't mean giving stuff away for free or bowing to your customers demand

There is nothing more valuable than a loyal customer. I'm sure you've heard the adage "keeping a customer is cheaper than acquiring one", not only is that true, but loyal customers will bring more customers to your business - cutting down your acquisition costs even more!

In Product Development we aim to develop products people love and products people want to use.  The only way to do this is to understand your customers wants and needs.

Before developing a product

When creating any product I ask myself

  • what type of customer am I building this for
  • what need does this fulfil
  • what want does this fulfil
  • how / when will the customer use it
  • is it intuitive - will they understand why it's good when they see it
  • where can I find these customers
  • how do I make money from this product
  • how do I test the concept, usability and cost
  • what will make a customer love this - how do I engage them

If you can craft a product that fulfils a need at a reasonable price you're off to a good start, if you then leverage your customer base and potential future customers for research and development you're going to find a long list of ideas to extend your initial concept and to bring new products into the mix.

Collecting ideas and backlogs

Alongside my prioritised near and mid term product backlogs, I like to keep another, long, unstructured backlog with

  • ideas from the business
  • requests from the customer service team
  • suggestions from the developers
  • feedback from the users
  • and of course thoughts from me!

The more ideas you have in a backlog the easier it is to find the gems that

  • fulfil a customer need
  • make the business money
  • are worth the development time

It also helps in consolidating research by bringing together connected ideas at the research phase, which then leads back to identifying obvious iterative product releases.

There's no point spending months building something your users don't want or need; at the same time there's no point spending months building something they want that has no  long term value to the business.

What makes a good Product Manager?

All of this is why it's so important for a Product Manager to be a jack of all trades. They need to really understand

  • customer research
  • business goals and return on investment
  • key performance indicators and metrics to measure success
  • analytics
  • interaction design and usability
  • user experience
  • developer processes (such as Scrum or Kanban)
  • the way developers think and work and the way non-developers think and work - communication with all areas of the business is key!

They need to lead the business in championing customer focused products, user centered  and research lead design and cutting edge design/development practices such as mobile first and responsive design.

Product Development and Management is a fine blend of creativity, analytics and practicality and that's why I love it!