Let me declare something at the beginning of this post – a good PM is one that knows their product, customers, competitors in and out, while a great Product Manager is one that sees the complete picture around these.
Becoming a good Product Manager isn’t a trivial thing. Product Management is all about a balance between multiple things that sometime contradict. How many people did you meet in your career that can take both the business and the technical perspective of a product? How many people do you know outside of sales that can have a coherent discussion with a technician, and the same one with a CIO?
Product Management is a lot about much of a lot. You have to be great from a business perspective. Maintaining a true understanding the technical side of the pains your product is solving is also a daily task. Keeping track of competition is yet another task that needs to be dealt with constantly. Oh, and we didn’t yet mention you are expected to be a monetization wizard. And that’s not all.
I used to spend hours thinking about everything that should provide me the complete picture – I used to interview customers over and over again to understand exactly what pain they are trying to solve with my product. I used to call (and still am calling) my past colleagues to understand how do they position the product and what do they need me to help them with (training, events, etc.). I used to meet with partners to try and sniff for some competitive landscape changes and I don’t think I had a week (and I keep doing it today) where I wasn’t involved in a sales cycle, a sales call or a presentation to a customer.
Good and Great PMs
A lot of PMs focus on knowing their product / features very well and are good PMs. I wanted to excel. I wanted to understand the complete picture. Knowing that this is critical to my success, I started looking at a method for that.
I am far from being a modest person, I’ll tell you that. I’m preamping the next sentence with that as it might sound strange without the preamp. I could’ve been a very good Product Manager. I focused on the complete picture. As a result I was coming closer to being a great one.
How could I gain a complete picture started to take much of my time. Firstly, I used to interview customers over and over again to understand what pain they are trying to solve. Hopefully – with my product. Secondly, it was common for me to call (and still am calling) my past colleagues for some G2 about the competition. From trying to understand how do they position the product to gather “what else do they need”. Sometimes it was more training, sometimes it was meeting customers, sometimes something else.
Getting Salesy
I don’t think I had a week in my PM life where I wasn’t involved in a sales cycle. This could be sales call, an account strategy discussion or a presentation to a customer.
In all cases – these were great opportunities for me to gather more pieces of the puzzle. I never stopped there. I used to meet with partners to try and sniff for some competitive landscape changes.
Personally, for me, it was easy to arrange these meetings. I used to be in the business of selling security for over 15 years before I became a PM. Personally, I know how hard is it to sit in front of a customer without answers to competitive pressure. Remember that I was the one giving PMs a hard time when things “not working as advertised”. As a result of this experience, both as a PM and later as a PLM, I should be working daily to solve this. And if I don’t have the full picture, then it’ll be running in, at least partially, darkness.
Gaining a Complete Picture
There are multiple ways to look at the “Complete Picture” you’d like to ensure you constantly have. I like to look at this from an Inner and Outer circles perspective. The inner circle is where you have constant touch points with. This circle includes your customers, your sellers (internal and partners, if you have such) and your competitors. The outer circle includes things that impact you but might not have a touchpoint with you or your product. This circle includes tangential technologies and trends, market economy and geopolitics.
The inner circle is the simplest to explain, and I have covered some of its importance in the post about “The People Product Managers Just Can’t Succeed Without“. Talking with your customers, with your sellers and keeping yourself up to date about the competition is what you seek. The inner circle is probably where you have most impact as a PM. You can tackle the problem directly, listen to your customers, an come up with a simple solution that gives you a competitive edge.
The external one, even if you are working for one of the Big Five FAAMG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google), is easier to gain knowledge about though it is much harder to influence. You must, however, be proactive in responding to what is happening outside. If you haven’t read the news about cloud early enough, your competitors might’ve shifted to the cloud before you did. If you didn’t read in between the lines, you might’ve shifted too early. Similarly other news about geopolitics and changes in the market economy will allow you to adjust early enough. Missing some of these, might mean death to the product or company. I’m not much of a future teller, but we can all understand that the COVID-19 means death for companies the like of WeWork, unless they change their business model. The same would be with geopolitics. Missing the fact that TikTok is in a quarrel with the US Government might give some of its suppliers quite a headache. Fastly, whose stock declined 37% after updating their forecast due to TikTok’s activity being a future unknown, can tell you all about that.
Example: Business School Tools in Action
Even if you haven’t attended a business school, you should read a couple of articles about Porter’s Five Forces. For a PM, understanding the competitive situation is critical. In his book “Competitive Strategy” (Michael E. Porter, 1979), he suggests to analyze the competitive from 5 perspectives.
Porter speaks about the following forces: Competitive Rivalry, Threat of New Entrance, Threat of Substitution, Buying Power and Supplier Power. Analyzing your products’ competitive situation from each perspective will show you where will the next offensive come from. And combining information from these perspective is where this gets fun. Is it an existing competitor using a shift in buying power? Maybe a new rival that will find it easy to enter the market? How about mergers and acquisitions of your customers, your competitors? Will that change the pressure?
Yes, a Product Manager MUST know all of the above in my humble opinion, and even much more. While the depth of this knowledge will vary across different organizations, different products and different teams, some of every thing described above must be there.
How would YOU recommend a PM to gain knowledge and understanding about the above areas, regardless how their career path brought them to becoming a PM? Don’t be a stranger, leave your thoughts in a comment!
