What constitutes a good product manager and when should we hire one?

Originally published on Kapuno in the Sandbox community

Product management is a crucial (yet thankless) role that holds product organizations together. If you’re an coder at heart, like myself, you may be a bit leery of my statement but give me a chance to explain.

What do they need to do?

1. PM’s run air cover for product design & engineering so they don’t get distracted while their trying to execute a given milestone.

2. Own the schedule for their product(s). They should be able to answer to why it is built a specific way and tie development to stakeholder needs.

3. They often write or, at least, prioritize user stories and work with design/engineering to flush out the best way for the product to assuage the pain point that exists.

4. Day-to-day they work with engineering to ensure that they are aware of the conversations within the organization, how they’re performing against a roadmap, and every once and a while injecting new problems that need solved.

5. They define key metrics and communicate how the product is performing against agreed-upon key performance indicators. This is important for design and engineering so they may realize a design isn’t working or requires improvement.

6. They must be maniacal about following the market, competitors and how the org’s product compares. That doesn’t mean they need to want to copy, but they need to be able to answer to “Why you don’t do X like Y does?” The ability to look forward is a huge plus but really rare. A visionary product person is basically a CEO/CTO.

7. They need to say no, a lot, to many people.

Finally, they pick up slack and do every random job that comes up to make sure that everyone has what they need to be successful. This could include doing research for engineering, design or picking up coffee after a long night. Numbers 8 - ∞ weren’t included for brevity.

Qualities in a Product Manager

1. Like an entrepreneur, a PM should be likeable and empathetic. They need to be amazing listeners. If you’re interviewing them and they don’t seem enthralled in every word you’re saying, they probably aren’t great. They need to be able to keep the stary eyes for every mundane conversation within the org. The worst problem a PM can have is people thinking that they aren’t listening / integrating feedback.

2. They need to be good at cooling down hot conversations and getting people to empathize with one another, users, and other stakeholders. This is often hard with big egos that often take hold in engineering and sales.

3. To be a successful interface intra-organizationally, they need be technical enough to call BS on the engineering timelines and realize how to translate the technical details to higher-level stories/features for non-technical people in the org. Depending on your org that could mean sales, account management, and/or business development.

4. They must be organized, meticulous and analytical. Specifically, product managers must keep tabs on how features are impacting performance. PM’s should also have experience planning, executing, reading and communicating the results from optimization and split tests.

5. They need to be great at managing both up, down and horizontally. If you’re thinking I’m talking Six Sigma, I’m far from it, but half the title is manager. As everybody has ideas for the product including the CEO and the junior intern, the PM needs to be able to learn to smile and sincerely repeat phrases like: “We’ll add that to the roadmap”, “That’ll go in the queue”,  “We’ll get back to you on a date”, and the best one “If we do what you want we can’t do X in time,” where X is an obvious high-priority task which must be done first. Also, engineers don’t often report to product, so it’s important that PM’s can ‘lead without authority.’ Sometimes, engineering will disagree with product and the PM needs to manage horizontally to bring the parties together.

Quick tangent: Product vs Project Manager

It’s important to differentiate between project management and product management. I don’t generally see a need for project managers, but product managers are meant to add a ton of insight in to the product. They tell engineers how people are using the product and help everyone make informed decisions. Project managers manage pipelines, schedules and feature lists but aren’t responsible for inventing. Product managers require the ability to work with engineering & design to create delightful experiences that solve users’ problems. In the end, engineers should self-organize and schedule by using SCRUM or any other method they choose.

When do I hire a Product Manager?

You should consider hiring a product manager when the product usage generates enough incoming information both from analytics and from the market where the need arises need to filter, prioritize and distill the deluge of data. Moreover, when the organization begins to have stakeholders which require some translation. Basically, the moment you have sales/account management you need a product lead.

If you don’t have sales, you need a product manager the moment you feel that there is a lot of internal churn conversation that’s slowing progress. Think of the PM as the mediator who works to keep all the trains moving and helps remove issues before they become fire drills.

Oh, and one more thing!

Product management is often a thankless job. Many engineers never realize exactly how much of their time/brainpower was spared because a good PM kept folks away. They honestly deserve a ton of credit for what they do but sadly, they’ll never get it.

So, cheers to our friendly product manager. May she always cut ruthlessly and always ship on schedule.

What are the most important qualities that you’ve found in a product manager?

EDIT: *If you’re coming from HN, here’s a link back to there to respond:*http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5118112

Responses

Shawn Hamman

February 03, 2013

Awesome write up. If only every product manager I’ve come across fit the profile you’ve described… life would be sweet. So sweet.