Let me declare something at the beginning of this post: a good PM is one that knows their product, customers, and competitors in and out, while a great Product Manager is one that sees the complete picture surrounding these elements.
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 of 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.
Good and Great PMs
A lot of PMs focus on knowing their product and features very well—and they 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 otherwise: I could’ve been a very good Product Manager just by knowing the features. But I focused on the complete picture. As a result, I was coming closer to being a great one.
Gaining a complete picture started to take much of my time:
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Customer Interviews: I used to interview customers over and over again to understand exactly what pain they are trying to solve. Hopefully—with my product.
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Colleague Intel: It was common for me to call my past colleagues for some intelligence about the competition. I wanted to understand how they position the product and what they needed me to help them with (training, events, etc.)
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Partner Meetings: I used to meet with partners to try and sniff for some competitive landscape changes.
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 a 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. 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. 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 were “not working as advertised.”
As a result of this experience, both as a PM and later as a PLM, I work daily to solve this. If I don’t have the full picture, I’ll be running in partial darkness.
Gaining a Complete Picture: Inner and Outer Circles
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.
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The Inner Circle: This is where you have constant touch points. This circle includes your customers, your sellers (internal and partners), and your competitors.
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The Outer Circle: This includes things that impact you but might not have a direct 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. 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 the most impact as a PM. You can tackle the problem directly, listen to your customers, and 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), is easier to gain knowledge about though it is much harder to influence. However, you must be proactive in responding to what is happening outside:
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If you haven’t read the news about cloud early enough, your competitors might’ve shifted to the cloud before you did.
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If you didn’t read in between the lines, you might’ve shifted too early.
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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. For example, missing the fact that TikTok is in a quarrel with the US Government might give some of its suppliers quite a headache (as seen with Fastly in the past).
Example: Business School Tools in Action
Even if you haven’t attended 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” (1979), Michael E. Porter suggests analyzing the competitive landscape from 5 perspectives.
Porter speaks about the following forces:
Competitive Rivalry
Threat of New Entrants
Threat of Substitution
Buying Power
Supplier Power
Analyzing your product’s competitive situation from each perspective will show you where the next offensive will come from. Combining information from these perspectives 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 or competitors?
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, products, and teams, some of everything described above must be there.
How would YOU recommend a PM gain knowledge and understanding about the above areas, regardless of how their career path brought them to becoming a PM? Don’t be a stranger, leave your thoughts in a comment!
