“We don’t need a tool,” you think. We don’t need them and don’t use them, it’s a waste of budget and they are overly complex!

In many regards this is true. You don’t need a tool. You’re right, you don’t. Not really… But that is like saying teams don’t need a CRM for sales or a help desk for support. In the strictest sense, you don’t need a tool to do anything, but it sure does help.

Tools are optional until they are mandatory

You don’t need a product management tool to do your job, but there are several benefits to introducing a tool that are worth considering. Even if you are happy with your set up as it is, the right tool can streamline your product management workflow and even shape the company’s culture.

Tools are but an augmentation of the human condition.

Using a tool is about being more effective and efficient about the goals we are trying to reach. It is about opening new possibilities that are hard if not impossible to do without tools. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it most certainly was built with precise engineering and the most modern technology for its time.

“But we’ve never used a tool before and that’s the way we’ve always done it! It worked for us!” That sentiment is a great way to be left in the dust. Just because something has worked before doesn’t mean it can’t be done better – and to be better, you need a tool.

How to think about product management tools the right way

The decision to get a new tool should stretch far beyond the walls of the product team – after all, your product IS your business.

You’re deciding what and how you’ll communicate with the rest of your company and how they communicate with you. You’re deciding what kind of product habits you’ll instil across your company and the rhythm at which your business moves.

Your product management setup is really a decision around what kind of product culture you want to bring to your business.

“Having a product culture is about having the product, the very thing that you’re building, at the heart of the business, a core aspect that’s granted the attention it needs. This means that everyone in the company is an advocate for what you’re building and how you’re building it.

The most successful product-centric companies include a team that considers a solid product to be the top priority, and in my experience, the quality of work done by a team who’s collectively bought in and invested in the product vastly outperforms one who doesn’t.”

Janna Bastow, Co-Founder and CEO, ProdPad

“But we’ve got Excel, post-it notes and whiteboards!” Indeed. We all do. All of which are fine and useful but that is not the same as having a dedicated tool that improves your skill set.

So whatever you’re looking at now – whether it’s a homemade setup of spreadsheets and Google or the hottest new tools on the market – be sure you’re accounting for the future of the team you want to work in.

Will what you have today work tomorrow? Will it hold up to the needs of a growing company? Here’s what you should think about to help you make the right call.

Take a look at your existing set

The three most important elements of product management are customer feedback, the product backlog and the product roadmap. If you can consolidate them into a single tool, you should.

The more there’s on your plate to manage, the harder it is for you to map out and understand important relationships in your data.

The constant stream of data flowing into any company needs validation, if you don’t know how to map it to something tangible, you end up drowning in it. If you can understand what pieces of feedback are important to your customers, they become the basis for your ideas. Once you do that it’s not difficult to pivot your roadmap based on validated important ideas. How can you understand what ideas are important to your customers if you can’t connect them? How do you know where to pivot your roadmap if you can’t see what’s important to your customers?

Leaving them in silos not only makes it more difficult for you to drum up new insights, it also makes it difficult for people on your team to flag up important issues.

For example, if you want is to make a case for a new experiment, you should be able to pull up the data and reasoning to support it.

Just because it worked early on, doesn’t mean it will scale

The reality is that you’ll lean on different tools/processes at different points of growth. That being said, now is still the time to plan and budget for the future because changing down the line will be disruptive.

I see so many product managers using spreadsheets when they first start off. Now we love spreadsheets, they’re useful, easy to use, and get to the point. There’s a reason Excel is still one of the most widely-used tools in any industry.

But if you’re using spreadsheets today, you’ll need to start thinking about how it will scale as your team and product grows.

How do you plan to accommodate a growing team and more user data?

Regularly, using a spreadsheet as a backlog tool results in a vertigo-inducing stack of requirements with a mishmash of columns, half of which are assorted footnotes, mixed anachronisms and colour coding.

Another popular use of spreadsheets is to use it to communicate a roadmap

Spreadsheets, however, are not known for their visual design, being leant upon for visually communicating your entire product strategy. It may have started off feeling like a good idea, but you’re mostly spending your time fighting with it these days. (Especially when Excel is so editable – team members might make “tweaks” to make it “clearer” – which as we all know means it’s a convoluted mess that gives you a headache.)

Same goes if you’re using multiple tools: you need to start considering now how you will consolidate these tools in the future.

Whether it’s a matter of multiple tools or processes, making changes to the product management process is uniquely disruptive since it affects the pace of product releases.

Good tools vs great product management tools

There is a reason why our ancestors relentlessly iterated and improve their tools from stone and bone, to bronze, to iron. Each tool improvement made people better at their tasks and opened up new horizons.

Product management as a discipline and a craft is no different. While you can do it without tools and rely solely on the latest and greatest fad framework, you will do better with tools.

Good tools allow you to do your job. Great product management tools help you become better at your job by nudging you towards best practices and philosophies.

So how do you know what to go for?

Here’s a real world example:

When we first started building ProdPad, we used one of the best tools in the market: JIRA.

The tool itself was inherited from our development team, which was initially outsourced. JIRA in itself is a fantastic tool and has a great name behind it, so we didn’t really question using it.

But as the team grew and our process became from refined, we started clashing with JIRA. We weren’t getting the team visibility we wanted, it was overly complex, and we were falling behind on releases.

That’s when we decided to switch to Trello. As a tool, Trello fit our process, allowed us to be agile, and it increased our productivity and visibility throughout. We now release twice a week, have sprint meetings once a week, and have a seamless integration with ProdPad.

In this situation, we learned what tool is great for us as a company and a team, and in our case, that meant making a switch to something else! Lesson learned.

Takeaway

There are good products and there are great products – and that will change from company to company and team to team. Ensure you set the right tone and process for your team by selecting a tool that will help you become better at what you do, and improves your overall productivity.

Remember:

• Whiteboards, post-it notes and spreadsheets don’t scale.
• The days of product managers being whiteboard jockeys are long gone.
• Frameworks are guides and suggestions – they’re not tools. They often become about the dogma and not the process.
• Starting your search through best-of-lists is a great jumping off point, but ensuring you keep what you want to end up with, top of mind is key to success.
• A great tool is a tool that is right for you. Sometimes it’s not the market leader if its premise is contradictory to how your team operates.
• The addition of a dedicated product management tool will allow you to do your job better.
• The addition of a dedicated product management tool will improve your skills and help you become a leader.

The post Product Management Tools – Are They Worth The Hype? appeared first on ProdPad.

What is a Product Manager?

Product Managers generally lead and work across teams to get their product designed, built and launched. They’re responsible for getting data, analytics and expertise together and making the final call on product decisions.

In reality, that comes down to handling a lot of little pieces at once: managing the product backlog, maintaining the roadmap, getting stakeholder buy-in, talking to customers, and coordinating multiple teams to ensure you’re all working towards the same goals.

This is no small task – it involves a lot of people wrangling. In fact, the most important qualification a Product Manager brings to the table is their ability to work with people.

In the following Slideshare, you’ll see that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a former pizza store manager or a violinist.

What really matters is how good you are at getting people from different areas of the company, with different agendas and motivations, to unite behind your vision.

How do you find the right Product Manager experience?

Our Co-Founder Janna Bastow got her first Product Manager experience after a few months on the job as a customer support rep at a software company. The company was a mess, and she found herself instinctively sitting there putting the pieces together. For example, she was spending all day talking to angry customers about the same problems with no end in sight.  

So she started writing out and handing over detailed solutions for the development team – those are known as product specs, as she found out later.

Her manager noticed that she had a knack for the job and formally promoted her to Product Manager.

So that’s one way to go about it – be an accidental Product Manager until someone finally notices.
But really, here’s what you need to keep in mind. If you’re actively looking to make the jump to product management, it’s important for you to identify your talents, interests and strengths so you can land a job where you can make the most impact.

All Product Manager roles aren’t created equal: product management jobs vary by industry, company and even sometimes by department.

When you’re looking for a new job, these are the factors you should consider:

Do you want a creative or technical role?

When you’re looking at job listings, you’ll find that there is a wide range of product jobs out there. Some companies are seeking candidates with creative skills while others are looking for someone more technical to help maintain an existing product.

There’s a lot of advice on Quora about finding the right product role, which you should definitely consider:

“One company might have a Product Manager that’s primarily focused around business, market analysis, business relationships, etc with only a little bit on the creative and the technical side.  Another might have a greater focus on UI/UX and design, or (you guessed it) the technical aspects.”

Think about which type of role plays to your strengths. If you want the creative license to build something entirely new, you might want to focus your job search on companies that are looking for a candidate like you.

In contrast, you’re likely to find yourself working in a more predictable environment, look for roles working with existing products.

Are you passionate about the product or field you’ll be working in?

You can narrow your job search down significantly if you focus on products you’re passionate about. Remember that as a Product Manager, you’re responsible for setting the product’s vision and direction. Good luck doing that for a product you don’t care about.

What’s your passion? Healthcare? Fintech? Travel? Beauty? There are tons of products out there that you can make your mark on. Take the time to think about what you really want to do and where you really want to make an impact.

Sure, you can think of it as just a job. But being passionate about your product will really make the difference for both your career and the people you work with.

Make those long hours worth it.

Are you working with the right culture?

The term “culture fit” comes with a lot of baggage, but it’s almost a necessary term. When you’re considering companies to work with, look closely at whether you’ll be working in an environment where you can succeed.

Does the company have a supportive culture? Do they have the right values in place?

Do people who work there feel like they are valued? Will you be able to test new ideas? Will you encouraged or discouraged from bringing change into the organization?

You can glean this kind of information just by talking to people who already work there. If they’re happy at their company, that will shine through in the way they talk about their experience there.

Look also at whether the company has benefits and perks that will help you keep learning while you’re on the job. Will you have access to a mentor? Will you have a budget for attending conferences and workshops throughout the year? Will you have a budget for getting your company set up with the right tools and processes?

It’s a good sign if a company has these things lined up already!

II. Getting hired as a Product Manager

Make yourself visible

Get plugged into the online #prodmgmt community:

If you’re new to the world of product management, I have good news for you. The online product management community is both active and incredibly welcoming to newbies.

Here are the first steps you should take:

Get yourself set up on Quora and Medium where there’s already a lot of chatter.

Join any of these online communities for Product Managers

Follow these top product management people on Twitter

You can get plugged into the conversation on Twitter right away: get started by following #prodmgmt and #productmanagement.

Feeling shy? Get yourself started by leaving comments on other people’s work. Not only will that be highly appreciated, but the more you write and tweet, the more visibility you get. All this will go a long way in helping you break into the network.

Network and attend meetups:

Being online is great, but nothing beats good old-fashioned going out and meeting people in real life.  

Product Managers attend meetups not just to keep up with the industry, but also to potentially recruit new hires. If you’re serious about looking for a new job, it’s not a bad idea to mention it while you’re mingling with new folks you meet at these events.

Even if they’re not hiring, chances are they know someone who is.

The following events are pretty popular and well-attended – find an event near you!

ProductTank: Monthly meetups for Product Managers in 100+ cities around the world

ProductCamp: Free, user-driven “unconference” for Product Managers and marketers (around the world)

MindTheProduct: The conference for passionate product people (in London and SF)

You can always head to Meetup.com to find local product management events near you.

Meeting the right people at a company can help you fast-track your application at a company. It definitely helps to have someone on the inside who can vouch for you.

Put yourself on the market

Check in with HR:

If you like where you work and want to move into a Product Manager role, let the hiring manager know! It’s likely that you already have a good deal of product knowledge if you’ve been at your company for awhile, and that will definitely work in your favor.

Sign up for job boards

There are also a handful of places where you can find companies hiring Product Managers. Check out the following job boards:

Mind the Product Jobs

PMHQ Jobs

LinkedIn Jobs

Do your homework: Take advantage of product management resources

Books you should read

Product management is a fast-changing field of expertise, and we are all learning as we go along. There’s a lot of reading available online! Here are a few of our favorite ones:

• Product Leadership by Martin Eriksson, Richard Banfield, and Nate Walkingshaw
• The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen
• The Art of Product Management by Rich Mironov

There’s no shortage of books on product management. You can find a much longer, crowdsourced list of recommended reading for Product Managers here.

Blogs and podcasts you should check out

Oh, where do we start? These are a few of our favorites, but again – there’s no end to this list!

• Silicon Valley Product Group (Marty Cagan)
• Mind the Product
• Ken Norton
• Product Coalition
• Women in PM

You can find an extensive list of product management blogs here, and you can read all about the best product management newsletters here.

You can also try our Resource Center to find our in-house resources on product management, product roadmapping, and more.

Ready to go all in? 

The exciting thing about product management is that there’s no one road to gaining Product Manager experience. There’s no official certification you need to enter this field. There are no barriers to entry – and it’s a role where you can make a real tangible impact at your organization.

The truth is, the best Product Managers are self-taught.

If you’re serious about product management, the best way to prepare is by getting out there, listening, and learning from other people’s product management experiences. Try out our Sandbox environment, a pre-loaded ProdPad setup, where you can see ProdPad in action, at your own pace.

Our product management blog has even more articles on a range of PM topics.

The post How To Become a Product Manager With No Product Management Experience appeared first on ProdPad.

Are they moving the roadmap forward?

At the very least, your company should have an internal public roadmap. While we know this isn’t a product manager’s only focus, items on the list should be updated and moved around as priorities change and evolve through time. If items aren’t moving, it’s time to have a chat.

Are they leading their peers?

A product manager’s most important skill is their ability to lead. The best way to evaluate that is to speak to other team members. Do they feel like they’re they being heard? Is their feedback being considered? This isn’t a popularity content. Every company’s PM may not always be most likeable person in the team (their job is to sometimes say “no”… a lot!) but they should still be empowering their team to share and comment on upcoming features and ideas.

A product manager does get the final word on product decisions, but that also means their team members should feel comfortable enough to approach them with their ideas. Everyone from sales to marketing to support should understand the product’s vision, and still feel like they’re being considered. It takes these interpersonal skills for your PM to successfully lead their product’s development.

Are they challenging product requests?

Is your PM showing the right analytical skills? Your product manager should challenge you and say ‘no’ once in a while – yes, even to you! Your PM can’t be a pushover. It’s not a good sign if they accept requests without raising an eyebrow first. At the end of the day, a PM who fires back critical questions is facilitating the kind of valuable discussions that prevent shaky or otherwise questionable ideas from moving forward.

Are they shipping?

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s true. Has your product manager actually shipped anything at all? If your team continues to be stuck in the same ideation stage without successfully delivering anything, then the product manager might not be communicating or leading effectively. Of course, a great product manager must have an equally great product management tool – so make sure they’re using ProdPad!

The post Is Your Product Manager Doing A Good Job? appeared first on ProdPad.

Always include the business case

A common complaint among engineers is that they get specs thrown into their inbox with zero context. Not fun, right? They’re part of the team too – and they deserve to know why they’re building a spec. Before you send over an idea to your engineering team, make sure that you’ve drawn out enough background information to help them understand what they need to deliver. This could include specific customer feedback, key comments from other teams and of course, the business case.

The business case is really just these two questions:

1.What problem are you trying to solve?

2. What impact would it have if it were solved?

If your team or product people work with user stories, you can enter those within the idea too. You can push those independently from the idea or one by one – you choose! They will all still remain part of the same epic so your team can work through the tasks.

If you have supporting documentation and mockups, include those in the idea. We support mockup versioning as well, so both you and your engineering team can keep track of the documentation progress.

Don’t things look better already?

Keep things tidy

Now that you’ve organized all the relevant parts of your spec for your engineers, clean up the rest.

Keep all conversation, votes, and comments all in one place so it won’t interfere with their work. What you want to do is give them the time and space to work on their job without the extra clutter.

So if you can control their view, keep their tasks clean and allow them to focus on what they need to do. They don’t want (or need) to be concerned with the rest.

Don’t be a dictator!

Keeping the conversation separate from the engineering workflow does not mean you shouldn’t include them in the conversation. Let them see what’s going on – don’t just throw stuff over the fence and expect them to blindly work on things! By giving your whole team access to ProdPad, they can cooperate, understand, and contribute to new features as you’re spec’ing out for them.

Once your idea is ready to go, push it over to your development tool such as JIRA, Trello, or Github via (we integrate with all of them) and have the team start working on it. Voila!

ProdPad is a tool for you and your whole team. Sign up for a free trial today!

The post How Smart Product People Bridge The Gap With Engineers appeared first on ProdPad.

You’re struggling to manage expectations with your roadmap

Perhaps our number one challenge (at least according to this survey way back in 2009) is roadmapping. In my chats with product managers, what is specifically challenging about a roadmap is not simply deciding what to build when, but how to communicate this out to your team and customers. If you often find yourself backtracking when artificial deadlines come around, you likely need to reconsider many preconceived ideas about roadmaps to better manage expectations.

What can you do?

• Banish dates from your roadmap, and instead be firm on your commitment to current, near-term or long-term developments.
• If you can find a proxy that everyone is comfortable with, you can set vague time brackets for these allocations to help with communications.
• Make your roadmaps as open and visible as possible so that your colleagues and customers feel that they are integrated in the product loop
• Treat your roadmap as a fluid, changeable document. Use a format that is appropriate for demonstrating changes and making updates in light of new decisions. Share these processes visually with your team.

It’s hard to focus on your strategic product direction amidst day-to-day demands

Many product managers see their most important objectives slipping further and further away as the day is taken over by urgent, but less important tasks. Perhaps roadmap features are getting pushed back in favour of quick fixes, or the distraction of endless emails and meetings means you can’t find the time to concentrate on strategy.

What can you do?

• Break down big strategic goals into manageable tasks – whether this be to interview a customer or source intelligence from a colleague – and integrate these into your daily routine.
• Keep your product vision at the fore of your mind by making it physically visible. Print it out and stick it around the office.
• Consider the business case for every decision, no matter how small. Develop a system whereby if you commit resources to a product change, you’ve measured whether the impact will outweigh the effort.

Aligning your company on product direction is threatened by different teams’ biases

A product manager should be 100% focused on the needs of their target customer. But there are many different people in your organisation who are key in how to get there. Sales, Marketing, Customer Support and every other customer-facing role has invaluable insight into what customers want and what is key to success in gaining new ones. Trouble is, every team is biased towards their own objectives and world-view, making it difficult to align each one on product direction.

What can you do?

• Be the link that brings different teams together to collaborate on product discussions. When everyone is able to see the big picture – and the different viewpoints that come with it – part of your mediation work is done for you.
• Make sure that all employee input is securely captured and traced. This way if a particular departmental concern can’t be satisfied by one project or development, you can point to how it is being actioned elsewhere.

Your executive level doesn’t always agree with your product decisions

The role of your executive team in the minutiae of product decisions depends heavily on your business, its size, and the individuals involved. But regardless of how interested your executives are in day-to-day product management, these are the people you ultimately have to convince of your vision and decisions to get there. So when they aren’t behind you, this is a product manager’s most crippling challenge.

What can you do?

• Follow a rigorous and repeatable process to qualify new ideas, whether they come from a customer support rep or the CEO. You must be equipped with reasoned arguments for or against any product decision, and train your executive team to expect the same for their brainwaves too.
• Make sure your product decisions are grounded in business value. If you’re finding yourself battling your senior team to push back on or push through a suggestion, are you sure you’re taking the right approach? Every product change should reflect a real value to the business – be it customer retention or competitive survival – and you should be collecting the evidence to prove it.
• Again, be open and transparent on roadmapping. Once aligned with your executive team at the highest level of product strategy, the smaller decisions should be easier to support against this framework.

[bctt tweet= “Overcoming a Product Manager’s Biggest Challenges:”]

If you’d like more best practice, read our 7 pillars of good product management

And if you’d like to see how ProdPad can help to make your life easier, sign up for a 14 day free trial today

The post Overcoming Product Managers’ Biggest Challenges appeared first on ProdPad.

Check your calendar

If you’re in town on Tuesday, April 9th, there’s a ProductTank event happening. Come for a free round of drinks and a chance to chat with a bunch of other product people. RSVP for ProductTank

If Wednesday works best for you, there’s another meetup where Simon will be demoing ProdPad and talking about where we’re taking future development. RSVP for StartupProduct

Coffee (or a drink!) on us, any time

Regardless, if you’re in the area, we’d like to meet you! Get in touch for a coffee or a drink at simon@prodpad.com.

We’re happy to demo ProdPad to your team, give product management advice, or just generally chat. Let us know when works for you!

The post Want to meet in San Francisco? appeared first on ProdPad.