Product management is a melting pot of a lot of roles and skills. There are many expectations from a product manager, like aligning various functions and teams, having user empathy and representing the user on the table, leading product development with a data driven approach, managing stake holders so that a cohesive environment is created for product development, and many more. But the most important expectation from a product manager is to ship the product, on time, every single time. So in the chaotic atmosphere of product development, where chaos steadily increases as the release date approaches, being able to hustle is a very sharp skill in a product manager’s arsenal. Hustling does get a product shipped, period. So a product manager must learn to hustle…but not always.
The most prominent need for hustling for a product manager comes when there is a need to clear roadblocks to product release. Product developers and product designers are required to dive deep in their functions and crafts to create a product feature that really resonates with the end user. This generally results in them settling in silos and they tend to communicate less and make more assumptions as the development sprint progresses. If left unchecked, this creates gaps in the user experience and threatens missing release timelines. Thus the successful delivery of the product feature hinges on the ability of the product manager to keep the communication channel always open among different functions and make sure all can see the larger picture and the end product beyond their silos. To achieve this, the product manager does everything and anything that keeps the development wheel spinning ahead. She assists the designers in creating the mocks, she assists the developers in testing the intermediate parts, she keeps higher stakeholders apprised of the development status and ensures interim feedback and new constraints flow back into the development plan, she preempts the corner cases and keeps everyone informed throughout the development cycle, she keeps devops informed in advance to keep the staging and production environments ready for deployment, she helps everyone take those micro-decisions of prioritizing tasks on a daily basis, and what not. Even after the product feature releases, she works with analytics to quantify the tracking metrics, she works with marketing to communicate the salient features of the product and locate and acquire users, and most importantly, she starts identifying the next phase of feature enhancements for the product. In short, she hustles and gets the product shipped. It’s all good till you realize that “good” is not good enough.
Great products are created when the product team goes beyond the good. On the path of hustling to deliver good product features, a product manager should continuously strive to create great products. Great product features require careful planning and empathizing with not just the end user, but also with the internal teams working on developing and shaping the product. Being the communication channel among developers, testers, designers and other stakeholders is good, but creating the process of documenting requirements, updates, issues and resolutions in a crystal clear manner and inculcating the habit among everyone to participate and make use of it is great. Roping in analytics, marketing, operations, and sales teams post the product feature launch is good, but aligning them early in the development process and setting their expectations and participation is great. Measuring user feedback post the launch and deriving inferences for next steps is good, but studying similar products in the market and studying how your users would react to those features in your product, and charting a probable path from MVP to phase n is great. Ultimately, having the sense of ownership for the product, understanding what your users want and what they actually need, understanding the challenges each function and business team faces in contributing for the product, and continuously creating the environment where those challenges are addressed and resolved is the true mark of greatness.
Great products require having a perspective of where the product started from, where it is right now, and where it is supposed to go. Great products require having a year long vision, having quarterly milestones, having strategies to achieve those milestones, having month long roadmaps to try out those strategies, having weekly sprints and daily standups to course correct as early as possible. And great products require a product manager who steers the product development ship in the right direction. As that product manager, hustle all you want when there are rapids, but mostly try to have the holistic awareness of where you are, to chart the path for this ship so that rapids can be steered away from.