3 Product Manager Needs
Preface: There are more than 3. These are generalizations, certainly debatable, often dependant on scaling your strategy.
Trust
In the most ideal situation, control over the product is only part of the equation for a Product Manager. True product vision comes with underlying decisions that can impact the entire company. It is incredibly essential that executive leadership understand, embrace, and support that impact.
That may be a lot to ask of your company’s chief officers but the alternative is seeing the results on the other side. Hindsight will be 20/20 when the customer support team gets overloaded or advanced à la carte services have to be redone free of charge. Everyone knows better than to put the team in a situation where you're torching through valuable hours of your most senior engineers to fix preventable issues. It will become crystal clear when the opportunity cost is the functionality needed to close new sales.
Access
If your executive strategy or roadmap doesn’t mesh with your product strategy, you’re likely underestimating your Product Manager. If you’re positioning yourself for an acquisition, you’re likely trying to pull the right combination of levers across the organization. It can be very tempting to meddle with the teams, processes, or even pricing structures orbiting the product before looking to the actual product itself.
Correlation is often confused for causation in business. Strong Product Managers will be able to adapt their vision and strategy to not only mesh but enhance the executive strategy. Don’t pull the wrong levers to overhaul your entire customer success team to drive advanced service revenue. Let your Product Manager create a product offering that not only boosts short-term metrics but also lays a foundation for efficiency and opportunity for the external customers as well as the internal customers. Boom. Synergy.
Tools
Give your Product Manager $2-5k every year to invest, trial, test-drive new tools. Especially on smaller, newer product teams. Product Managers eat sleep and breath optimization, innovation, and efficiency so sometimes they just need to get into a product and experience it. That’s obviously a somewhat vague statement to make. Product-minded thinkers are constantly running simulations, playing out scenarios, or testing hypotheses using a variety of methods. Sometimes quietly in their head. Sometimes on a whiteboard wall. Sometimes with their phone. Sometimes formally, other times informally.
Trust the process… Remove barriers to your Product Manager’s success, don’t create them.
