As Product Managers, we’re often involved in making decisions and driving others to decisions that need to be made — sometimes dragging them kicking and screaming toward the future. And in doing so, there’s often an undercurrent of “reaching consensus” that runs through discussions and permeates meetings comprised of varying people with a wide breadth of interests and agendas. But the simple fact is this: consensus is, more often than not, a means by which the great is sacrificed at the altar of groupthink. Great ideas are rarely consensus-driven ideas; they challenge too much of the status quo to be something that everyone can agree on. Let’s explore some of the ways that consensus-driven decisions suck…
PM 101 – Working With Service Teams
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted one of my “PM 101” articles, so I figured with 2017 just kicking off now is as good a time as ever! Past articles have focused on marketing, sales, and design teams, but this time I want to focus on service teams. These types of teams are your integration specialists, your technical sales people who come in after a deal has closed to help clients onboard, or even your own internal team that uses your product on behalf of your customers. No matter where exactly they sit in your organization, service teams can be a prime source of information and validation for any Product Manager.
The Challenges of Predicting Future Behavior
One of the ongoing challenges that we face as Product Managers is that we’re primarily charged with predicting customer and user behavior. We’re constantly asked to come up with new ideas, new features, and new designs that we “know” will delight our users, or at the very least satisfy them. But the fact is, predicting human behavior is incredibly difficult — there are many thousands of people who have spent hundreds of years trying to figure out why people do what they do (they’re called psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists), and we’re still making educated guesses at best. So, what are some of the challenges that we face?
Leading Through Influence: Identifying Fellow Influencers
We’re often told that Product Managers “lead through influence” — that we don’t generally have the direct authority to get things done, but rather do so through convincing others of the best option available from the myriad choices they have. The bad news is, that’s really damn hard. The good news is, we’re not alone — in any given organization there are many different teams and members who lead through influence rather than authority…and identifying who they are and how we can work together with them is an essential tool that every Product Manager needs to have in their back pocket in order to be successful. Here are some clues that we can look for to identify those fellow influencers so that we can work with them and not against them.
“Humans Are Hard…”
Never have I heard a better description of the challenge that faces Product Managers than a quote that I overheard at this year’s ProductCamp Seattle — “Humans are hard…” spoken by none other than my fellow General Assembly Product Management instructor Tricia Cervenan, as part of a panel discussion. Those simple words struck a chord with me, as it made me think about all of the different ways in which we as Product Managers attempt to understand, document, and predict human behavior. Every single day I can come up with some variation on the idea that “humans are hard” impacts us in some way. [Read more…]