Know your domain
In order for a product manager to be effective, they need to have as much context if not more context than any other in the business under the product that they are being held accountable for. To be that domain expert it takes continuous effort to understand the customer, data, business, and industry.
Customer.
To understand the customer’s perspective and needs, a PM needs to dig in qualitatively. This involved interviews and constantly talking to those using the platform. These aren’t just high-level conversation about the product, but instead intentional conversations with a research plan with questions that the PM needs to be answered based upon the assumptions and questions they have about the user.
A PM must think outside of their own preferences and recommendations and instead come with recommendations based upon the end-user perspective. If the product is for accountants, the PM needs to understand the accountant. If the product is a travel business used by individuals 50+ years old, it is critical that the PM work to see the product from that older demographics’ perspective.
Data.
It is critical for a PM to know how the platform is being used quantitatively. They need to care deeply about what the health metrics for the product are. Daily, this involves getting into the analytics to see what is changing, understanding why they changed, and identifying opportunities.
The product manager needs to know what traffic, conversion, and engagement of the platform is at any given moment. They should come into the data with the hope to get answers to the questions they have based upon the qualitative insights that they receive from customers.
It is vital that data is integral in the goal-setting process. Goals need to be data-informed with a focus on outcomes of what is released, and not the output of the item getting released without any analysis of metrics.
Every project being prepared needs to have a release plan, key metrics, and a bet as to what will change early on in the discovery process. That means that the PM must know what the baseline metric is as well as where the metric can be.
Business.
It can be easy for a PM to focus too much on the customer and solving their problems, but it not having an impact on the business. The PM must understand the needs of the business, and understand that their role is to make the biggest impact to the business by solving customer problems. This involves being informed on unit economics and understand what profitability looks like from the different offerings of the business. This means that the PM needs to understand what marketing is doing to get traffic to the platform as well as how operations is working with users from a sales perspective.
Industry.
Lastly, the PM needs to understand what is happening from an industry lens and know how that impacts the business. This involves reading up on public statements as well as doing market research. A PM should frequently be using competitors tools and knowledgable about the different value propositions that exist and how the products are different from business to business. I frequently suggest that a PM do an audit of competitors to get a comprehensive understanding of what others are doing to solve the same user problems.