We asked seasoned product managers for the best piece of advice they ever got. Here’s what they said:
“There's been a continuous theme. When I was at university, some of the advice I was given was that if you try to do too many things and get involved in too many clubs and activities and classes, you're going to exhaust yourself and you're going to reach a threshold where your work quality will go down. You're a finite person, you can only do so much. Figure out what your priorities are and only do those without getting too exhausted, or at least have a strong plan for how you're going to build in time to recoup in between all these different things that you're trying to manage and do.
When I started at Intuit we had a lot of Brown-bag sessions and sessions with leaders, and I found it interesting that the same feedback came back. How it's usually phrased within business is "don't be afraid to say no." Often, especially early in your career, people will ask you to do pretty much everything and if you accept all of it then suddenly, you're going to be trying to do everything for everyone, and something is going to get dropped in there. You must be able to figure out not only how to prioritise as a product manager, but when to say no and how to do that effectively.”
Megan Caywood Cooper, Chief Product Officer at Barclays (ex-Starling Bank, Intuit, Xero)
“A long time ago when I was still an engineer, I walked into a performance evaluation and my manager gave me a bad evaluation. I sat there a little surprised, and I said, "Hey!" and I listed all the things that I had done. He said, "Rags, perception is reality". I was kind of mad at him, but over time, especially as I've been doing more of a product role, I realised it was actually quite a profound bit of feedback that he had given me. If you think about it, a product manager’s role is about managing multiple stakeholders at once. You have engineers and designers who they work with, on one hand, then customers, sales, internal clients, their managers, the people who report to them on the other side.
It's very easy in that situation to compartmentalise information to different groups. For instance, if you're talking with engineers and they give you an update, it's very easy to forget to give that update to the marketing team. Time and time again, what you run into is that there is dissimilar information that different people know that you work with. That creates a perception among people that is very different for the same product that everybody is trying to build together.”
Rags Vadali, Chief Product Officer at token.com (ex-Meta, Google)
“The best piece of advice I’ve been given has been around managing my personal biases, and any inertia I might have. As a product manager, it’s really easy to fall into the trap of, ‘I think this is a good product’ or, ‘I think this is a good idea’, or, ‘I think this is a good feature, so we should go do it. If I think it’s good, everyone will think it’s good.’
It’s important to know that every decision you make is influenced by the environment you’re in, the cultural background you have, the team you’re with. When you unpick all the biases that go into a product, it makes it easier to manage them and then try to manage them out. Ultimately, you’re building your product for your customers, not for yourself, and if you can manage biases, then you can manage any inertia that you’ve got, then you can build a product customers really want.”
Adam Warburton, Chief Product Officer at Vypr (ex-Co-Op)
“Bring people along with you, so that the product development process doesn’t just consist of businesspeople making decisions, which then go straight to a developer. What we really need is for the developers involved to understand the business priorities and what trade-offs are being made. A lot of times, they can make suggestions that help shape how you go about developing a certain feature, such as an epic or part of the division for your product or launch. One of the things that worked practically before a big product launch was to have a whole day where we wrote ideas on index cards, the kind of big epics of features we needed to deliver as a minimum product. We sat there, everyone rearranged the cards, and we all talked about what order made sense and the dependencies involved. The developers had a lot of valuable insights and we all agreed by the end of the day (me and twenty developers!) what we were going to build, and they knew the reasons just as well as I did.
The second piece of advice that I think has been really valuable for me, particularly in a start-up, is: Know your IP and know where you want to differentiate. In bigger companies, but particularly for start-ups, when you have limited resources and you’re trying to get something out there so customers can use it and you can get the feedback, don’t build everything from scratch. You have to actually understand your point of difference, the part you’re really going to focus on and make better than anything else. There are lots of other great tools and plugins, as well as other things, that companies have worked on and you can bring in to support you, while you focus on the one or two things that really matter.”
Anita Rajeswaren, VP of Product at CLEO (ex-Google, Amazon, Yahoo)