Move along the spectrum to becoming a better product manager

You can’t become an outstanding product manager overnight, but becoming one is almost always obtainable – as long as you understand your goal and take incremental steps to improve in order to get there. These steps include continuous learning, iterative improvements, and applying a product mindset in more and more situations before you get to an “ideal state”. Moving along the spectrum is important; there are principles and strategies you can adopt now and gradually feed into your own workload, without having to make any drastic changes or relying on huge organizational shifts in entrenched processes. 

Teresa Torres uses recommendations for continuous discovery to illustrate what this spectrum of improvement might look like in a product person’s day-to-day work. In an ideal world, she recommends a product manager talks to customers at least once a week. This might seem overwhelming, especially if your week is already bursting with meetings. But if you’re striving to improve your work, then gradually increasing the amount of time spent with customers so you speak to them a couple of times a quarter is a valuable step in the right direction. Then move this to a few times a month and eventually you’ll be speaking to customers every week. By shifting carefully along this spectrum and taking a methodical approach, you can achieve your objective.

Move to the next level with ProdPad’s help

Supporting you as product managers to be the best you can be, both as individuals and within your organization, is integral to ProdPad’s ideology. We provide you with the tools you need to push towards success. I’ve broken down how ProdPad helps you to transform into the type of product manager who consistently and effectively manages products that generate positive outcomes for both your customers and your business. 

Move from opinion-based decisions to customer-based decisions 

Innovation expert Steve Blank highlights the importance of customer-based decision making by saying: “No facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” You need to listen to what your customers are experiencing by collecting feedback on your product. Don’t rely on what you or your key stakeholders think when you have a catalog of customer perspectives and needs at your fingertips. Without customer validation, how do you know how your product is holding up? Is it truly solving customer problems? Without a customer-centric approach, you will build stuff that you think your customers want instead of what they actually need, resulting in mountains of tech debt and wasted development costs. 

With ProdPad, you can easily link ideas and feedback together to ensure the right decisions are made. 

Embrace time horizons and ditch timeline roadmaps

We’ve said this time and again at ProdPad – remember when our CEO, Janna Bastow, did a thing on Twitter? – but a roadmap full of dates will not do you or the product team any favors. I appreciate that a shift from deadlines and features to time horizons and themes won’t happen overnight, so why not start by setting work to be completed by each quarter, and then gradually phase out time restraints altogether? Fortunately, it’s still possible to show time on ProdPad’s lean, outcome-focused roadmap  so you can emphasize the problems being solved both now (with more detail and certainty) and in the future (with less detail and certainty).

Measure success based on impact and outcomes rather than features 

Considerably more important than the number of features your team ships each development cycle is the impact those features have on your customers and the outcomes they help to generate. Josh Seiden defines an outcome as “a change in human behavior that drives business results”. Rather than adopt a “feature factory” approach whose primary goal is to churn out as many features as possible (with questionable assumptions about their ultimate value), ask yourself what problem you’re trying to solve and how confident you are that the delivered feature will solve it. Adopting this mindset means you’ll become more focused on prioritizing work that is valuable and worthwhile. ProdPad’s Ideas feature allows product people to chart all ideas on an Impact vs Effort matrix to aid in relative prioritization of those ideas.

Be transparent with your organization as well as with your customers 

Your organization needs to know what you’re working on and the outcomes you’ve generated. Stakeholders need to see that the strategy is being executed, the sales team needs an idea of what features are coming out soon, but you should also make sure you’re transparent with your customer base. Let them know you’re listening: tell them when you’re working on solutions to their problem or when you’ve released something that addresses feedback they’ve given you. In ProdPad you can create multiple versions of your roadmap, tailored to each of your different audiences and with appropriate levels of detail for each, which is perfect for transparency, visibility, and gathering input on features under consideration.  

Learn from the functionality you’ve just released 

I’ve seen too many product roadmaps that end once the code for a feature gets pushed to production. A product manager’s job shouldn’t simply stop once something has been released. It’s critical to learn from the freshly released functionality so you can iterate and improve accordingly. When crafting an initial idea and building it out for development, make it a practice to predefine a set of success criteria and how you might measure them so you can easily determine whether it achieved the desired outcomes. Start documenting these outcomes so you and others on your team can incorporate what you learn into future work. It’s these learnings that may go on to shape, or even adapt, the rest of your product strategy. The completed roadmap cards in ProdPad contain fields for tracking how well the shipped ideas met the desired objectives. 

Consider both business and customer outcomes

It’s all about striking a balance. Of course your customers need to be at the forefront of your product strategy, they are the ones for whom you need to deliver value. But a great product manager is able to ensure that they’re aligned with the rest of the organization and working towards the same objectives. In ProdPad, user outcomes are incorporated by tying customer feedback and problems to the ideas making up every product initiative. Additionally, ProdPad has an Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) feature to ensure that the desired outcomes (both business and customer) are identified and to measure progress towards those objectives facilitated by the relevant initiatives. 

Signing up for a free ProdPad trial will allow you to take your product management game to the next level by incrementally, or even significantly, improving on a regular basis. Remember to refer back to this blog post and consider how each point can be applied to your current context in our awesome product management tool – you’ll go from good to amazing in no time at all. Good luck.

The post The Path to Becoming a Better Product Manager appeared first on ProdPad.

As part of my role helping customers (especially Enterprise) set up their ProdPad account, I get to see product leaders who are excelling at their craft and empowering their teams to do the same. It’s a continual pleasure to work alongside them and help them deliver product management at such a high level.

So what sets great product leaders apart and what qualities do I encounter when collaborating with them?

Team empowerment 

A product manager cannot, and frankly should not, do all of this alone. During stressful times, when you’re juggling multiple tasks and responsibilities, it might feel like you’re doing it by yourself, but it’s important to recognize that you’re not. Make the most of the unique skills across your entire team and empower them to be the best versions of themselves. Don’t let members become despondent. This will result in them feeling further removed from the product and the rest of the team. With more people working remotely it’s now more important than ever to check-in with people, provide constructive feedback, and celebrate their accomplishments, including times when they uncovered a key learning from a “failed” experiment. In times like these, it’s even more important to create an environment that allows, and even encourages, failure-driven learning.

The best product leaders provide the necessary structure and empowerment to their teams that enables them to make decisions independently. This level of autonomy and trust is only achievable by providing strategic intent and clear guidance for your product team. Set clear objectives and key results (OKRs) to align your teams towards the same set of objectives. This helps communicate the direction of your product and shows what the desired outcomes should look like. Your product teams can refer back to the planned OKRs to make sure they’re working on the right stuff and product decisions are focused on achieving progress towards the targeted outcomes. Providing your teams with as much context and guidance as possible, without dictating decisions, will help them feel in control and empowered – that’s how you can generate the autonomy and trust needed. 

Strategy and direction 

A product leader needs to define the framework for decisions to be made by the product team. This is why an effective product strategy needs to be clearly articulated and communicated. It’s important to think about how objectives from individual products can collectively achieve the desired outcomes for the overall business. Let’s say, for example, that you’re building a B2B product for property management companies to use, but you also provide a consumer-facing product (like a mobile app) that integrates with your main product. In this case, achieving engagement or utilization objectives for the mobile app will likely drive corresponding objectives for the B2B product, thereby increasing your overall business objective. It’s your job as a product leader to understand how individual product objectives fit together and contribute towards improvements in portfolio-level objectives. 

ProdPad’s portfolio canvas helps product leaders clearly define and communicate their vision and strategy. There’s space for you to describe the value proposition, problems, and solutions, as well as channels, revenue streams, and cost structure to help you articulate your product vision to all areas of the business.

Practice what you preach as product leaders

High-performance product leadership is not something that you simply learn from reading a book. Much like a product, a product leader needs to develop, learn, and adapt as necessary in order to be successful. Don’t be afraid of failure. As long as you document key decisions and accurately record the outcome of each initiative, you will be able to learn from each of your efforts. This, in turn, reduces the risk of bigger, more impactful failures in the future. 

It’s important that you transparently communicate your learnings, discoveries, and failures to teams under you. This is so junior members are aware that everyone, regardless of seniority, is seeking to continuously learn and improve. As a leader, every comment you make is magnified and, whether you realize it or not, will be seriously considered (and sometimes immediately acted upon) by everyone around you. It is your responsibility to promote a culture where people know they can fail and feel supported if they do. This honest and open approach to leadership instills a sense of freedom and autonomy within your teams.

Product managers are willing to stretch themselves, risking failure, knowing they are operating in an environment where it is safe to learn and iterate. For this to work, it has to start at the top. You’re in an influential position, with people looking up to you for your professional opinion and experience. 

Product leaders should check out our Idea Backlog

Our Idea Backlog is just one of the features which are highly regarded by product leaders on our Enterprise plan. Product managers now have a tool to capture, manage, and prioritize ideas from their organization, no matter the source or how “out-of-the-box” the idea might be. It helps the team focus on the most valuable ideas with a minimal amount of risk. It also simultaneously allows for creativity and innovation. Ideas going into ProdPad should be seen as an experiment. It is a potential solution to solve a defined problem – not as a feature request. It is a suggestion, often based on partially or entirely unvalidated assumptions, which may or may not be built. With testing and valuable team discussions, however, product ideas are able to develop without acquiring tech debt.

Tap into the whole organization

Understand the skills and knowledge of other teams within your organization. A good product leader will not only work within the capabilities of their own teams but also ensure that other functional areas are contributing to the development of product initiatives, too. Innovation and creativity often comes from sources outside the team working directly on the product. Make sure you’re keeping abreast of wider company discussions which might influence the initiatives you’re going to work on. For example, the marketing team might have carried out research and obtained valuable data on the current landscape. Perhaps the sales team returned from a tradeshow with feedback from prospective customers. Use this information to innovate with your teams and connect it all to the bigger picture. 

As mentioned previously, you are not alone in your journey towards better product management and leadership. ProdPad is home to some great product experts available to you. Why not book yourself in for a free demo? We’ll show you how you can use ProdPad to become a high-powered product leader. You can always reach out and catch me on Twitter, too.

The post How to Excel as a High Performance Product Leader appeared first on ProdPad.

We’ve written previously about how OKRs are used to align your team around the same set of goals. However, there are a few points product managers need to be mindful of when implementing OKRs into their product strategy – especially those in high-level positions.

1- It’s an objective. It’s not simply a goal

An objective is an actionable target that clarifies the desired outcomes. A goal tends to focus more on measurable outputs or milestones. Product objectives contribute towards achieving wider company-led goals, and the connection between them would be outlined in the product strategy.

2- It’s a key result. It’s not a key performance indicator (KPI)

Key results focus on the direct outcome of specific activities (or initiatives) which can be measured and learned from. KPIs are more commonly used to measure the continued success or progress towards a defined performance measure, not an outcome-focused objective. A lagging KPI may well lead to a discussion to identify a future objective (complete with the key result) to improve it.

3- Initiatives are something different, too 

An initiative describes the specific activities or projects the team is working on to influence the success of an OKR. Even if you identify what you need to achieve (the objective) based on the company strategy and determine what good looks like (the key result), you’re not going to get very far if you’re unable to clearly communicate the actions you plan to take in order to get there (the initiative). 

Let’s use this as an example:

Objective: Improve your overall health to avoid illness or injury

Key result: Lose 15 pounds by the end of 2020

Initiative: Exercise for more than 30 minutes at least 4 times per week

4- OKRs don’t always have to cascade 

OKRs should not be put in place to control teams and trickle-down keeping everyone in check. They are used to unify teams, stretch yourselves to achieve greater things, and ensure that everyone is moving towards the same destination. Specific product objectives do not need to be entirely derived from  those at the group level. It is the product manager’s job to make sure their OKRs are directly linked to the outcomes their products are seeking to achieve and not last week’s departmental leadership meeting. ProdPad can help you avoid this issue through the product and portfolio canvases. The portfolio canvas establishes the vision, high-level strategy, and approach to achieving the objectives for the entire portfolio of products. Some, but not necessarily all, of the product objectives should align with and help achieve those portfolio-level objectives.

5- Don’t lose sleep over the stretch target 

Objectives are there to point you in the direction you aspire to go down. If you hit 70% of your stretch target then that should be applauded. You’re trying out something that hasn’t been done before. As long as you are testing and making informed decisions a reduced achievement won’t be massively detrimental. Be sure to record the outcomes of each OKR so that you can learn and improve. This will help you reduce risk in the future and operate on a more cost-effective basis. 

6- Avoid gamifying objectives and key results

It’s important to remember that OKRs are not there as targets for the individuals in your teams. OKRs measure the overall success of the product’s performance. As a leader, it is not best practice to start trying to hide targets under your OKRs. This will stifle innovation and growth as team members will end up gaming the system to improve their individual performance. One great way to combat this is to build in counter-metrics that pair a quality metric with the quantitative key result measure. 

When done well, with buy-in across the entire organization, OKRs can be a valuable tool to increase alignment, foster innovation, and propel your teams to greater success. Looking to implement OKRs into your own organization? Book yourself in for a free demo where our product experts will be happy to help. 

The post Six Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing Objectives and Key Results appeared first on ProdPad.

Collaborating with your team is tough enough when you’re all in the same room. But remote collaboration, when you’re all in different rooms around the world, really cranks up the challenges. 

When I joined ProdPad last year as the first team member based in the US, I nervously wondered how productive I would be when collaborating with colleagues in the UK. Nearly all members of my project teams (both colleagues and clients) in my previous role at Pivotal Labs were located in the same open space office. At ProdPad I found myself at a new company trying to work closely with my teammates using a variety of software technology and tools to enable productive collaboration while remote.

However, I didn’t realize when I joined how valuable our own product, ProdPad, would be at facilitating this collaboration. These are key ingredients which are essential for maximizing the effectiveness of remote team collaboration. These include collaboration timing, providing input, conflict management, and awareness of changes. I’ve found that ProdPad can facilitate each of these ingredients in powerful ways.

Remote collaboration can occur simultaneously or at different times

It’s important when you’re working across time zones to ensure a seamless transition between asynchronous and synchronous activities. By the time I’ve had my first cup of coffee in the US, most of my UK-based colleagues have already spent many hours contributing ideas, answering customer questions, and asking for feedback. I need to be able to get up to speed quickly and contribute my own thoughts and ideas. 

To review new work efficiently and make my own contributions, I typically rely on two tools: Slack and ProdPad. Fortunately, the ProdPad integration with Slack means you don’t even have to leave Slack to review and contribute. Anyone on the team can tag you for input from any ProdPad discussion, idea, or design. This means you’re quickly aware of where to focus your attention. Any new ideas created in ProdPad are put in a designated Slack channel for you to review, add thoughts, or ask questions. Best of all, the idea in ProdPad will stay in sync with any activity that occurs in Slack. 

When you log into ProdPad, there are visual indicators in the header for any new activity and updates on discussion threads in which you’re involved. Clicking on any of the discussion topics opens a sidebar so you can view the entire thread and contribute directly. 

Minimal friction for everyone to provide input

In general, for any work to be productive and effective, you should minimize friction and the barriers to accomplishing any task. When working remotely, you don’t want to miss out on a team member’s great idea or insightful question, so by integrating ProdPad with the other tools in your organization, they can contribute without having to log into another tool, and their input is recorded in ProdPad. For example, if your team is using the Slack integration, and a new idea gets added, then your team can add their thoughts or ask a question about the idea via threads directly in Slack. With ProdPad’s Chrome extension, your team can add ideas and feedback directly from the browser without opening ProdPad. 

You can also make it easy for customers to provide input in the places where they already interact with you. If you’ve set up a customer Slack community customers can provide feedback there. You can also use ProdPad’s Customer Feedback Portal on your website or in your app to capture feedback.

Remote working sometimes means a team member needs to contribute from a mobile device. The ProdPad UI is built to be mobile-responsive and you can even save ProdPad as a mobile app. 

With all these features, you can meet your team and your customers where they are… both digitally and physically.

Elegant handling of conflict management

Few things are more frustrating than spending your valuable time adding details to an idea or a user story only to find that someone else has simultaneously updated that section and overwritten your changes. Unlike many other product management apps used for collaboration, ProdPad works to elegantly handle any potential data conflicts.

ProdPad’s real-time collaboration feature shows if a colleague is viewing or editing the section you’re viewing. It does this by displaying their profile picture in the header. Certain fields will even highlight the field to indicate who else is working in that field.

Conflicts do happen, of course, but ProdPad is the only tool in the product management space that actually has a conflict manager built right in. If two versions of a field happen to exist, it’ll simply facilitate getting back to a single source of truth by letting you see what the latest edits are and choose the right version to move forward with. It’s just one of the ways ProdPad ensures that your data is never lost.

Another potential place for data conflict is the connection between a product management tool and a development tool. When you’ve synced up ProdPad with your team’s development tool, it’s important that the information added to either one isn’t lost or overwritten. To prevent this from happening, ProdPad simply syncs the status of the idea or user story. This way, the product manager can see it move through the dev process.

Keeping data in sync is also critical if you ever lose connectivity. Fortunately, ProdPad has an offline mode that allows you to keep working even when you lose your internet connection. You can continue to work while disconnected. ProdPad will automatically sync any work you’ve done when you re-connect.

Timely notifications to make everyone aware of changes

Product Managers will enjoy the most benefit from team collaboration by including more people from their organization. When everyone is contributing remotely, it’s important that you’re aware of when changes have been made and by whom. ProdPad makes it simple to review any activity that has occurred on things you care about, directly from the header of the app. Sometimes you may want to do this retrospectively for a specific idea or initiative. You can do this by using the revision history to see changes made to Roadmap Cards, Ideas, Feedback and Personas.

Remote collaboration involves digital communication almost exclusively. ProdPad allows you to customize when and where you get notified of any changes. You can choose to receive notifications from within ProdPad, or get a summarized digest of activity via email every hour. This is in addition to the daily and weekly digest emails of activity you can select to receive. You can mute notifications for a set time period to allow you to focus with minimal distraction. This is helpful if you have a highly collaborative team generating lots of activity in a short period of time.

Remote collaboration needs to help teams thrive

Adaptability and flexibility are the keys to success in the world of product development. These are particularly important when difficult and often unexpected circumstances arise. There are many reasons that your team will need to work together effectively while remote. With ProdPad and its integrations, you can be confident of remote collaboration with the same level of innovation, creativity, and efficiency that you experience when working together in the same office.

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