Every morning there is some serious catching up to do with what happened in the product world while I was asleep. There is massive information influx but when I transitioned into a service-oriented organization as a product manager I felt unprepared. I wondered how my days or months would look like in a company that didn’t have it’s own product?! Well, it was enthralling to just go with the flow. It’s now been over 6 months and it’s interesting to see the contrast.
How it all started?
In a service company, you always have a client and then you have end-users.The first project that came in had around 200 Invision screens and a document describing them. The client knew when and what she wanted, had a go-to-market strategy, a feedback collection mechanism and a set of test users. Oh forgot, the budget and resources were finalized too. It felt like someone had already done a huge chunk of my job even before I started.
It’s very easy to get obsessed about your client as they give you the bucks and ultimately it’s their product. But would it be smart to assume that the client’s vision is always backed up with the best solution? As a good PM you have to be end-user obsessed while trusting or challenging what your client thinks is the right thing to build. The key here is constant, clear and well-documented communication with the client about decisions.
It is very important to establish early on that anything related to the product has to go through you. The communication doesn’t have to travel through a network of business development or client engagement nodes but rather should be a peer to peer chat. Sometimes clients want you to build Rome in a day and most times you won’t gauge you are building Rome and hence making promises without bouncing it off with your team can be shooting yourself in the foot. Your latent job responsibility entails sensitizing the client about the efforts needed in building “seemingly-simple” things. Moreover, the client may want to throw everything and the kitchen sink in what she defines as a minimum viable product, justifying that is what the users want. It is your task to bring back the focus on features that add the maximum value.
A crucial step is to understand the client’s vision and align yourself and the whole team on it. This lets you marry the problem instead of a solution your client has identified. You bring a fresh holistic outlook and not just end up writing user stories. Your clients generally have domain expertise but building great products is your asset and institutionalising that confidence is a part of your job.
The product development phase oscillates from being complex to complicated. The everyday road to building a great product has obstacles which keep the journey exhilarating given you know how to cross those roadblocks. There are no clear cause-and-effect associations and hence the formula is to find a list of probable causes, experiment, probe, analyze and then repeat .The Cynefin framework defines two other phases “simple” and “chaos” which are two extremes. While “chaos” can blow out your brain, “simple” may just be a boring state. When Murphy’s law knocks at your door before a release, don’t spiral into attacking people rather focus on figuring a way out. I know it’s easier said than done when production doesn’t work. Ticking off all the features on the statement of work within the estimated timelines is surely an accomplishment, but what about metrics ? You should obsess over them as much as your client does if not more.
Should you work for a service organisation?
I’ll start with the pros. Your role as a PM is appreciated because your skills complement what the clients bring to the table. The projects span into several domains like healthcare, lifestyle, finance etc. and you don’t just end up working on a small chat feature within a product. You own the entire product and it is so much easier to see how your product makes an impact. You’re always on your feet because it’s rare that you work on a single product at any given point in time. It would be fair to say that the stakes of learning at the expense of failure are fairly low. So keep shipping and learning.
Words of caution
You may feel a little less control over the product than you might want to have. But that’s the price you pay for low risks. It is easy to get looped into the pressure of timelines because you need to deliver on promised deadlines. The only way out is to have great convincing skills and highlighting the risks as they arise.
I am sure as I ship more there will be more pages to this book.
For now, that’s all folks!
