7 Ways to Advance Your Career in Tech Product Management
By using product management principles in your day-to-day, you can future-proof your career, even if you're not on the product team. If you want to build great products, there are some tried and true best practices to follow. I'll explore these steps and how you can carry them into other parts of your professional life. Even if you're not focused on product development in your current role, these best practices can help you recession-proof your career.
7 Proven Tips For Advancing Your Career In Product Management:
- Foundation is key. Build from that.
- Evaluate your solutions.
- Asking the right questions.
- Co-create with others.
- When in doubt, cut it out.
- Value your top contributors.
- Create solutions for end users.
1. Foundation is key. Build from that.
A question to start us off: When constructing a house, would you rather have a secure foundation or one you did a subpar job on because you got too excited about putting up the framing? If you have a weak foundation, eventually the weight of everything built on top of it will cause the structure to collapse. The same goes for creating products and advancing in your career—if you want something that will last, take the time to do things correctly from the beginning.
2. Evaluate your solutions.
Developing a hypothesis is critical to building a product. At Value Creation Labs, we use psychographic analysis to narrow down the list of prospective targeted customers and develop powerful personas. Before you release your product to the world, make sure to test it out on a focus group or audience. This is key in understanding what improvements can be made to your product.
Don't skip user testing or your foundation will be at risk.
3. Asking the right questions.
The following early on questions you can ask and answer yourself will definitely help build a solid foundation:
7 QUESTIONS EVERY PRODUCT MANAGER SHOULD ASK
Which problem am I solving?
Who are my target groups?
Do I measure success correctly?
Would a customer choose my product over the competitors? Why?
Am I good enough in the technical field I am working in? Do I need to consult other engineers to help?
How long will my product be relevant?
Have I gotten feedback from parties involved? (Investors, employees, …)
"It's always important to start by answering the question 'Why am I doing this?'": Make sure you have a good reason for taking on a project, and be clear about what you hope to achieve. You'll be able to make decisions with confidence and clarity by working through these key questions.
4. Co-create with others.
Once you've validated your ideas and feel good about the projected outcomes, it's time to start working on them within the product team. If you answer a few key questions up front and get feedback, you'll be more likely to succeed in your product journey.
This is the point in the process where you determine how the UI and customer-facing experience will work. If you’ve followed the right steps, you have all the right materials to build the house - now it’s just about executing.
5. When in doubt, cut it out.
The concepting and design process is vital to coming up with a great product. However, it’s important to resist the urge to add every single idea in order to ship the product faster.
From these conversations, white boarding sessions, and prototyping will come a backlog of great ideas- it's crucial that the product leader captures these ideas and appropriately puts them in the backlog, in order to maintain organization and structure in the process. Prioritizing is necessary to determine features based on customer impact and cost to build. By mapping out a minimum viable product (MVP), you can avoid getting caught up in adding superfluous features, and keep the focus on what's truly necessary to get your product into users' hands.
To sum it up, you might have to leave some good ideas behind, but just make sure to add them to your backlog for later.
6. Value your top contributors.
From here, it's up to the product owner to show their interpersonal communication skills to lead the way. Along with building and executing a short-, mid- and long-term product roadmap (which is both an art and a science), developing close relationships with engineering, analytics, design, security and marketing teams is essential so you can plug them into the process. It’s not easy, but it can be fun if you love the challenge of being a general manager of your own domain. Forming personal relationships with all of the key contributors, from the most junior to the most senior will pay dividends when (not “if”) the waters get turbulent and you need to rally the troops.
You also need to ask yourself if you team even trusts you, and if not, how to change that.
7. Create solutions for end users.
The early stages of product planning are crucial for laying a strong foundation. Don't build based on personal preferences or unvalidated ideas - stay objective and focused on solving the challenges your prospective customers or users face.
So, build on a stable foundation and have fun doing it. Now, go create something amazing!
