How To Be A Good Product Manager

How To Be A Good Product Manager features tips on product management, written by Jeff Lash, a product manager based in St. Louis, MO who specializes in product management for online products, web sites, and software applications.

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  • Product management vs. project management
  • Understand qualitative vs. quantitative research
  • Be comfortable being uncomfortable

If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that once is enough to communicate anything important. If people attend a meeting or read their email, they should be paying attention to what is communicated and understand what it means to them. Why would you need to say anything more than once? If people hear it or read it and still don’t know, it’s their own fault for not paying enough attention.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, make your product everything for everyone. Who wouldn’t want an “all-in-one” solution? Since different types of customers may have different priorities, rather than trying to decide which customers and which priorities are most important, just meet them all. Sure, there might be a lot of stuff in your product, but that just means that customers will think that it does everything great.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, only worry about what gets added to your product, not how customers will take advantage of it. There may be some features that you don’t want everyone to see, or that may require some setup. Just put them in the product but don’t worry too much about how they’ll get set up — that’s for some other group within your organization to care about. Your job as a product manager is just to get the feature in the product, not to figure out all the details of how customers will enable the feature. Sure, it might be possible to make the process smoother, and customers may have to jump through some hoops, but if they really want it they won’t mind taking the extra effort.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, assume that lack of complaints means your product is successful. There are lots of customers using your product, so when you add a new feature or make a change and don’t hear complaints, that must mean that everything is working fine. If something was really unusable or broken or didn’t meet your customers’ needs, they would let you know. It’s much easier to just make a change or add something to the product and wait to hear feedback than to do a whole bunch of research and testing first — that’s just a waste of time, right?

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If you want to be a bad product manager, dogmatically follow product management rules. Learn a product management framework and abide by it it no matter what. Product managers need to “stick to their guns” and never give in. Thought leaders, authors, and consultants are experts and you should follow their advice without question.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, market the technical superiority of your product. Customers want innovative products, and since you are using the latest technology innovations in your product, you are bound to succeed. This shows you are progressive and ahead of the curve, so there is no danger of your customers being left behind with obsolete technology. People may not realize how the technology makes your solution is better than your competitors, but that’s just because the marketing people don’t understand it and can’t explain it well enough.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, jump into partnerships without considering all of your options. Maybe your customers are clamoring for a certain feature and a partner comes to you telling you they can help solve that need quickly. Sure, there may be other vendors who can solve it too, but then you would have to go out and spend time finding and evaluating other vendors. That would take too much time and you’re better off just going with whomever was first to your door. Or, what if there’s a company with cool technology that seems really impressive — you probably would want that in your product, wouldn’t you? True, you’re not sure how many customers really need it, but it would look great in a demo, and plus you’re afraid that if you pass them up, they’ll just go to one of your competitors.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, solve a problem as soon as it becomes apparent. Why let something linger when you can take care of it? A product manager needs to be seen as someone who will “do” things, not just “think” about them. When a problem comes along, you must fix it as soon as possible. Sure, you may spend a lot of your time in this way, and it may distract you from other things, though this is really the best use of your time, isn’t it?

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If you want to be a bad product manager, don’t bother measuring the results of product development work. Just put new features in there and don’t see whether they make a difference. If a customer asked for it, it must be worth doing. If people really don’t like it or if it’s hurting the product, you’ll probably hear about it pretty quickly. Plus, the market and competition is changing so quickly that you don’t have time to think about measuring the impact of new features after they are implemented. Once the work is done, you need to focus all your attention on the next set of features to add.

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If you want to be a bad product manager, try to deliver as many features as possible. The more features you have, the more likely you are to have the things that any individual customer cares about. Customers expect products to keep getting better, and the way a product keeps getting better is by adding more features. Plus, adding a whole bunch of smaller features will be just as good — if not better — than adding that one big important enhancement. More is always better, right?

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