There are multiple initiatives that the product team drives. Here are 9 critical tracks that I think a Product person should drive on a daily/weekly basis for their entire career while building great products. While these sound overwhelming, however, if you love being a product person, this will be your second nature.
Domain Expertise – Be an expert in your domain
You need to understand your domain exceptionally well. Be among the top 5% of the people in your domain that understand it well, know what’s coming and where you need to take your product based on that expertise. Learn every day, stay curious, demonstrate your expertise when you talk. To back it up, if you have the technical expertise about your domain, that’s the next level.
Industry Leadership – Stay on top of whats going on with your industry
Understand what’s going on in your field of expertise. New regulations, new laws, newer trends, newer ask from customers. What new standards are getting defined that can impact your product/service. If you are in tech, what are the big guys doing that can impact you in the long run. How can you participate in defining newer standards, rules, or technology that can become mainstream? Learn from the industry and influence it as well for good.
Customer Leadership – Know your customer and their problems well
Understand your customers changing behaviors around your product/tech. What are the top 3 things that customers care and what are you doing about it? Test your hypothesis by working closely with your customers/users. Analyze what complaints are raised, your NPS score, and how that can be improved. Define the requirements on behalf of your customer and visualize what they expect.
Innovation Leadership – Innovate and disrupt
Your team is your best resource for innovation. Drive innovative ideas by fostering the team’s creativity. They are heads down and solving critical problems on your behalf. Your team understands the deeper problem which you might miss out on. Bring the team together, understand the problems they feel are essential for your customers, go back and map them with industry trends, your domain expertise, and actual customers to validate. Work together to innovate and bring newer ways to address customer’s problems.
Analytics Leadership – Read the data like no one else
Build products based on the data you see. Understand the patterns. Measure what matters and iterate based on that. If you are not looking at data, you are making your own opinions which can be close to wrong. Spend every day looking at what’s changing, know why and correct if required. Get your hands dirty to play with the data, slice and dice it, create different views, eliminate the noise, and make sense of it. It’s fun!
Competitive Leadership – Monitor and learn from competition
You can learn a lot from your competitor, for that you should know exactly who they are and what are they doing and why. You and your competitor are solving similar customer problems; the exact way may differ; however, problems remain the same. Understand the solutions, try to get reasons for them, differentiate between short-term and long-term, understand the differentiation the competitor is trying to bring in. What key advantage does your competitor have, and how are they trying to protect it? Said that – Don’t over-use this info to give a seat to your competitor in your board meeting when you are strategizing.
A great quote from Howard Schultz – CEO of Starbucks. Another great article about learning from Howard Schultz is here.
Strategy and execution should not be determined by what your competitors are doing. Your competitors should inform you of what the game board looks like, but they should not dictate your next move.
Howard Schultz
Strategic Leadership – Define what to build, why and when
You have limited time, money, and resources to impact the business. That’s the starting point for you as a product person, and it will remain the same. You are not hired to just keep the lights on. All the above-listed factors change every day; new technology is changing your domain, the industry is defining new standards, competition is innovating to bring new features or drastically reduce cost, customer behaviors are changing, and what wowed the customer is now the basic expectations. What do you do? Strategize well for a long-term plan. Define a solid roadmap, prioritize, build your forte, innovate and disrupt. Stay relevant by creating a solid strategy and continue to execute it well.
Strong Partnerships – Stay human, make friends
You can’t win alone. Building a product takes a village and a lot of iterations to get it right. Build great partnerships with Engineering, Manager, Execs, Sales, Marketing, Beta, UX, Finance, Data Science, PMs Org, Support, Operations, and HR. Make every interaction human. You are working with people who are your greatest assets. A strong work relationship will go far and convert it into friendship. You will start seeing the results, and people will be happy to work for you, bring new ideas and work as a team. By product will be your product that people love and use.
Execute and Deliver – By all means deliver..consistently
Stay on top of execution to deliver said features on time and with excellent quality. Ensure these get rolled out to customers and drives business success in terms of revenue. Moving things from ideation to getting the solution in the hands of people is a considerable effort, and you have already signed up for it. Keep the execution going, do the health checks, resolve bottlenecks, prioritize and re-prioritize if required, but deliver.
Hope you like it. Let me know your views.
Mangesh is Product Leader
Full Bio here – https://mangesh.bhamre.in
