Becoming a Better Product Manager at Work: Four Forgotten Tips
With the product practice ever so prevalent across industries, the catalog of tips to optimize a product manager’s life is huge.
Yet due to the sophisticated variations of product management and its tough nature, some fundamental tips have fallen into the abyss of people’s minds, and here are four which I’d like to resurface
1. Prepare a list of frameworks, but apply them intuitively
Many PMs know the typical product or business-related frameworks that they’ve learned over the years. These frameworks can help establish mental models for a PM on the job, which can optimize product decision-making and navigate through other difficult situations. For example, the good ol’ SWOT analysis or Porter’s 5 Forces are world-known frameworks; they don’t get used on a daily basis for a product manager’s project, but they can, of course, provide a mental model for how one starts off on problem exploration. A PM can use parts of a SWOT or Porter’s 5 Forces to understand their problem space and its key competitors better.
My recommendation is to always have a general (not necessarily comprehensive) list of applicable frameworks that a PM can apply in real life. Of course, this may be counterintuitive to the usual argument about how frameworks taught in online PM courses or in business school should be used sparingly or only for mental models in the workplace. Many of my own mentors have advised me to never “directly use a framework for the sake of using it, as real-life problems aren’t that simple.”
That’s why a list of frameworks at your disposal, coupled with some experience on how to establish mental models, can actually help. PMs can, of course, just use parts of a framework (where applicable) to adjust to real-life scenarios, but having a full list in hand will bring awareness to more than just the few that a typical PM knows. You could learn to fuse various models together or apply parts of different frameworks instead. This hinges on how much experience you have in applying them in real-world scenarios, but the best way to learn is to start trying.
A list of frameworks + knowing when to apply them intuitively = success.
2. Focus less on the tools and more on what your team prefers
A new PM with previous experience using their favorite triaging, ticketing, prototyping, or document tools might have to say goodbye to all of them upon joining a new team.
Tools don’t matter. Even if one truly feels they’re more productive with one specific tool over another (think: Jira vs Azure DevOps vs Trello). If a team already had a good way of executing, then a new PM trying to “disrupt” their process for the sake of “introducing new things” might only backfire.
A great mentor once told me: It doesn’t matter if you’ve got experience with Jira or Trello. It doesn’t matter if you prefer Balsamiq or Figma for prototyping. It doesn’t matter if you need MixPanel, Qlik, or Google Analytics for data monitoring. Of course, having experience with these tools vs not having experience might give you a slight edge (since you reduce the ramp-up time needed), but it’s hardly ever a make-or-break.
A great PM will focus on their fundamental craft rather than their experience with various tools. These crafts include knowing when to apply proper mental models to real situations, prioritizing backlog requirements, conversing with cross-functional teams, and writing the perfect requirement documents for other teams to understand and execute on.
So be less obsessed with your 10+ years of experience with Jira, and more with your ability to make a positive product impact.
3. Providing feedback in careful but deliberate ways
A good PM knows never to hold back valuable feedback to either their coworkers or the product. If anyone who has a growth mindset can understand, it’s that people should always be open to constructive feedback to develop as both an employee as well as a person.
But as a PM working in a tough cross-functional team of engineers and designers — one that involves many different personalities and needs — it requires some careful articulation. Here’s an example.
If one engineer is okay with taking in any type of feedback that gets thrown their way, that’s great. But some may be staunch defenders of their work or designs, with justifiable reasons backing them. Product development is always complicated, so of course, deep conversations are needed.
A great detail-oriented PM in this case would ensure to listen to every piece of reasoning from their engineers or designers. They would offer compromises or bring business justifications to logically reason it out with their counterparts. But most importantly, they will tailor their articulation of feedback based on who they’re talking to. Thus, an arsenal of ways to converse and points of logic would be useful, and a PM should always escalate to leadership (in a peaceful manner) only when disagreements can’t be solved. It’s important to learn the personalities of those they’re working with, and converse with them accordingly.
Learning to tailor your conversations based on your audience is key.
4. Always being available for your team
This one won’t require lots of explaining: as a PM, since you don’t code or design, your responsibility to be as available as you can during working hours is important for the rest of your team.
Especially for PMs who have responsibilities that overlap with project managers, needing to help unblock teammates or external stakeholders is critical. Staying on top of emails or messages during work hours to ensure your team is issue-free not only cements your reliability as a PM but also increases the trust others have in you.
This, of course, doesn’t just apply to project execution — any questions or external outreaches may flow through you first. Being available during regular working hours as often as you can (outside of meetings, of course!) can help to establish a foundational reputation across your entire team.
Be available, and be reliable.
About Me
My name is Kasey. I’m passionate about writing and product!
Follow the PM Hive blog for more product, productivity, and job-hunting tips! Check out our PM Hive events over at https://lu.ma/PMHive