Table of contents

• Process
• Product Management

Process

Spaghetti Approach taken from How to Shape a Design Culture by Michelle Morrison
Dropbox Design Program Manager

The Loop taken from IBM Design Documentary by Invision by IBM

Product Management

The CEO of the product

Responsibility #1: Product Strategy

Quite simply, it’s the product manager’s job to articulate two simple things:

• What game are we playing?
• How do we keep score?

Do these two things right, and all of a sudden a collection of brilliant individual contributors with talents in engineering, operations, quality, design and marketing will start running in the same direction.  Without it, no amount of prioritization or execution management will save you.

Clearly defining what game you are playing includes your vision for the product, the value you provide your customer, and your differentiated advantage over competitors.  More importantly, however, is that it clearly articulates the way that your team is going to win in the market.  Assuming you pick your metrics appropriately, everyone on the team should have a clear idea of what winning means.

The result: aligned effort, better motivation, innovative ideas, and products that move the needle.

Responsibility #2: Prioritization

Once the team knows what game they are playing and how to keep score, it tends to make prioritization much easier.  This is the second set of responsibilities for a product manager – ensuring that their initial work on their strategy and metrics is carried through to the phasing of projects / features to work on.

The question isn’t what is the best list of ideas you can come up with for the business – the question is what are the next three things the team is going to execute on and nail.

Phasing is a crucial part of any entrepreneurial endeavor – most products and companies fail not for lack of great ideas, but based on mistaking which ones are critical to execute on first, and which can wait until later.

You should be able to ask any product manager who has been on the job for two weeks for a prioritized list of the projects their team is working on, with a clear rationale for prioritization that the entire team understands and supports.

Responsibility #3: Execution

There are parts of execution that are massively important to the team, and without them, execution becomes extremely inefficient:

• Product specification – the necessary level of detail to ensure clarity about what the team is building.
• Edge case decisions – very often, unexpected and complicated edge cases come up.  Typically, the product manager is on the line to quickly triage those decisions for potentially ramifications to other parts of the product.
• Project management – there are always expectations for time / benefit trade-offs with any feature.  A lot of these calls end up being forced during a production cycle, and the product manager has to be a couple steps ahead of potential issues to ensure that the final product strikes the right balance of time to market and success in the market.
• Analytics – in the end, the team largely depends on the product manager to have run the numbers, and have the detail on what pieces of the feature are critical to hitting the goals for the feature.  They also expect the product manager to have a deep understanding of the performance of existing features (and competitor features), if any.

Source: Be a Great Product Leader by Adam Nash — December 16, 2011