Kick start tips in managing products

Since I entered my path in product management I realised how easy it is to get confused while trying to get started. Aiming not to get lost in this big-big world of building products I promised myself to start making some kind of notes. Just to capture knowledge, thoughts and most important points that once helped me. And I hope it’ll also be helpful for everyone else who is a newbie in product management. Let’s walk this path together :)

Product management is not just a job. It’s a science, an art and a philosophy at the same time. So, congrats, now you’re a brand new product manager and your main challenge is to make improvements in product that will benefit both business and its customers, drive growth and usage and take the product to the next level.

The goal is clear but what should I do now? This question has been disturbing me pretty much. In order to figure it out I opened a book by Intercom about product management, which is recommended as a must-read for every new product manager out there. It really gave me a lot of info and the most valuable insights of it I’d like to share here.

Well, enough for the intro, let’s go!

Evaluation of your product

Before taking any actions that you believe will take the product to the next level, you should understand what’s going on in the product. It’s extremely important for decision making.

Visualise usage and find answers to the following questions: What are people actually doing in the product? How many people are using our product features? And how often? What % of users have adopted each feature?

Ok, we’ve got that, what’s next?

Divide features into two groups: ones with good adoption and usage rates, and others — with bad. For any given feature with limited adoption you can: kill it, leave it like that and increase adoption rate, improve it or increase usage frequency.

What can be the reasons of low adoption or usage rates you may wonder?

It may sound ridiculous but most times it’s not that feature is designed or built badly, it’s about how it’s explained. Users just need to know why to use it. Product marketing and proper customer communication is how you solve it, not tweaks in the product. Just educate your users and explain the value to them.

Adding features & improvements

I guess everyone in tech management knows roadmap consists of hard decisions.

The most important skill while dealing with roadmaps — be great at saying “no”. Not “maybe”, not “we’ll see” but the real “no”. Every product manager needs a firm checklist for when they say yes, and when they say no. And don’t make exceptions. Remember, building a great product is not about adding tons of new features. There’s little time to that point when your product becomes too complex and stops bringing real value to users.

Just think about that. You could even add tetris to your product and you’ll probably notice a boost of engagement but does this make you product better? You’ll always have a lack of development, time and financial resources, so is this feature really worth the effort?

“And what about very small improvements?” — you may ask. “It’ll only take a few minutes to implement.” Keep in mind — there’re no small changes, there’s never “just-a-small-improvement”.

Example from my real-life experience: we wanted to save last used business contacts list of Recents in our transfers so users wouldn’t have to type them manually again every time. Seems easy-peasy, right? Just take data from the last transfer, save it somewhere and show in the interface.

But before you start with any of “small changes” to your product, try to think about this changes a bit more:

How should the list be sorted? How will we store it? How will we display the brand name? Where will we get the icon of the brand? What if there are no contacts? What happens if mobile side received no data or the connection was lost? Should we enable users to edit or delete them? What other possible actions are worth adding? What are other edge cases we should consider?

But wait, there’s more… What about designs, marketing, translations & copywriting, instructions to customer care. Then there are info materials like release notes, user guides, updates on the web site and don’t forget about implementing analytics.

Sounds not so small now? Well, there are no small changes when you want to do things right and maintain a good quality of your product. It’s important to always understand what it takes to implement a feature before adding it to roadmap.

Building things clients want

Another tough question every product manager faces is what to build?

Remember, if the desired outcome is real, then people are already achieving it using some product in some way. Your job is to improve this way. Pick a need where the existing solutions are old, complex, and bloated, and find the simplest steps to deliver the same outcome.

Worse than being a hard decision of what to build, you’ll never truly know if you got it right. There is no right. There is no wrong. This is art, not an exam. It’s just you and your vision.

Also, research is a great help to understand what customers really need. But be cautious — what customers truly need is often not what they say they need and not what they’re asking for. Most times they just don’t know, it’s you who should find it out.

After you’ve found it don’t rush to start developing it right know. Stop and think again. Yes, in product management you have to think a lot on every step before doing.

Can we do it well and scope well? Someone says “It will be easier for users if we add this”, everyone nods, and a card gets stuck on a whiteboard. It’s only in the specifics that you’ll understand the scope e.g. “we should make an import feature and let people create custom fields, choose a type, a priority and permissions to be edited or deleted and set timezone automatically by parsing contact address within importing” vs “we should allow users to import contacts”. Badly specified features meet no one’s requirements, are shipped late, if at all, and add nothing to the product but confusion.

Engagement or “get-this-feature-used”

The main goal of every product team — not “get it launched” but “get it used”. New features are just pieces of code gathering dust unless people use them. To be so, there are some important points to follow:

• Discoverability — users should see and understand it.
• Clear value — users don’t care what you’ve done and how cool or innovative it is, they care of what they can do with it and what they get. Always explain the benefits to them.
• Never leave users alone in your new products or features — welcome them & show them around. There are plenty of ways to do that: intros, blank states, dummy data, tutorials, you name it.
• Choose right time to promote a feature — define rules and triggers when you think user is indeed ready to use it and make promotions right there inside the product.

These are the basic things that I believe can make a kick start in world of building products really smooth.

Wish everyone completed releases, clear roadmaps and successful launches 🚀