The Product Manager Pentagon
Over the past several months I have been constantly learning and implementing product management techniques. Being an early career professional with a non-technical background, it was a big challenge for me. But with an unbounded passion for technology, there was nothing that could stop me.
The biggest responsibility of a product manager (PM) is defining and maintaining the product roadmap. For building a great product roadmap, the PM must earn the trust and understand the expectations of every stakeholder relevant to the product. As a result, the PM has to play a variety of roles while interacting with these stakeholders.
From my product management learnings and experiences, I have created 5 roles that most aptly describe a PM. This is what I call the ‘Product Manager Pentagon’. I have shared details on each of these roles and also suggested how one can excel at mastering these roles. If you are an aspiring PM like me, this article will allow you to draw out on your own experiences and then discover the next set of skills you must develop.
1. The Customers’ Champion
Every action undertaken by a product manager should be focused at one goal — creating value for the customer (in turn, creating value for the business). I strongly believe in the philosophy of ‘Customer is king’ as there is practically no point in introducing or improving a product/feature that would not be appreciated by the end users. On the other hand, we are also aware that the customer is not always right. Between serving this king and fulfilling his unreasonable desires, a PM must be able to determine the customers’ real problems and not just give them everything they ask for. Similarly, someone from the team could want you to focus on a product/feature because it has a high margin, it sounds cool or it solves their own problems. You need to be able to filter the noise and only focus on the underlying problem.
To achieve this, you need to develop a ‘Product Mindset’. Personally, I would define the product mindset as a curiosity that never turns off. Whenever you look at a product (digital or physical), you should always wonder about these questions — What problem does this product solve? Who is it intended for? What are the most satisfying and annoying features? How would I improve this product? What is the value proposition?
When you frequently start asking these questions, you will develop a habit to analyse every product’s anatomy. Rather than jumping to conclusions because you feel “This makes more sense”, you want to ask questions, analyse information and then make decisions. When your product mindset evolves, you will be able to better shape the customer’s problems. And that directly enhances your ability to focus only on solutions that generate true value.
2. The Facilitator
Being a product manager is quite tricky, especially when you are responsible for developing a product/feature with others, but without commanding any authority over them. As a PM, you are leading cross-functional teams to develop the product/feature and you will never be their immediate manager/boss. In fact, every team member is probably only reporting to the head of their department (or maybe the CEO). At the same time, if something goes wrong with the product/feature, you will be held accountable for it — even if it’s due to the code solely written by the engineer. So how does a PM motivate a cross-functional team to perform their best? By being a facilitator.
Team members are likely to follow your lead only when they trust you, respect you and believe in your skills. Unarguably, the best way to achieve this is by sparking discussions across the team and bringing out everyone’s opinion. You must listen to their opinions, understand their perspectives and include their suggestions in the product roadmap (or deny them with solid reasons). You are the centre piece for managing expectations and making every team member feel valued for their contributions.
Additionally, let’s not forget that you are also the person that represents the product team. So you must also manage expectations of the stakeholders outside of your team such as senior management, customers, finance, legal etc.
3. The Interrogator
While interrogation does mean asking questions ‘aggressively’, I chose to use it to express the passion. As a PM, your greatest ally is the question ‘WHY?’ Why are we building this feature? Why focus on this customer segment? Why focus on these metrics? Why prioritise these issues?
And why should a PM ask the whys? The PM defines and leads the product vision. To do that efficiently, you need to be able to identify the true underlying problems. The whys will avoid you from getting lost amongst gut instincts, team opinions and customer feedbacks. When you start asking the right questions, you will be able to better understand your team and express your own opinions. Additionally, your team members are experts in their respective fields. Asking them questions will allow you to get the most from them and in turn expand your own knowledge. This will also directly feed back into your role as the facilitator.
4. The Jack of All
The PM is responsible for the product/feature all the way from ideation to launch to improvement. As highlighted earlier, you will have to work with engineers to build the feature, designers to build the skin, marketers to determine the messaging and sales reps to understand the customer. While a PM is not expected to actually code features or run ad campaigns, it is crucial to have the basic knowledge across these business functions. This is the exact reason why PMs are controversially referred to as Mini CEOs.
However, the pay-off of being a generalist is that you will lack depth across all areas. You will never be as well placed to make a decision as a specialist would be. You cannot tell an engineer what to code or tell a web developer how to build a specific interaction. You need have faith in their skills and only tell them about the requirements. How they reach the end goal is not for you to decide.
A word of caution here — don’t get too ignorant. As I highlighted earlier, the PM is held responsible for everything related to the product/feature. So you need to always remain informed about the processes and methods being followed by your team. It is reasonable for you to ask them to justify their decisions and consider alternatives if required.
5. The Juggler
This role is often pre-dominant in young start-ups and it fades out as the start-ups scale in size. In a start-up, you will always be short on resources and things need to get done within the hour. As a PM, you must remain flexible to juggle between roles. You may be running the Sprint Planning session today and tomorrow you will find yourself working on the web design sketches. You must be ready to deep dive across any business function and learn a new skill on-the-go. Will your output be as good as a skilled professional in that field? Not even close. Will your output be sufficient to test your assumption or to launch your MVP? Most certainly. Flexibility is the key here.
As the company scales in size, there will be more specialists to work with. You will no longer be required to work on any specific function as you can delegate it to the specialist. Instead of juggling between business functions, you will be more focussed on product strategy and its execution.
In summary, being a product manager requires you to inherit multiple roles at the same time. You need to be responsible and not be unnecessarily authoritative. You need to be the go-to person for everything related to the product/feature as well consider the product/feature’s benefits to the business in broader sense. I believe the best way to summarise is that product management is a specialist role that is requires you to be a generalist.
Key Takeaways
- To define and execute a great product roadmap, a product manager must play a variety of roles while working with various stakeholders
- Being curious will enhance your product mindset and allow you to better frame the customers’ problems
- Always encourage discussions and collect feedback from a cross functional team
- The question ‘why?’ is your biggest ally
- Product managers are generalists who must put faith in the specialist team members
- Be flexible enough to pick up any skill on-the-go and get things done
