In my product management career, I have made many mistakes and I continue to make new ones as I go forward. There are mistakes that product managers tend to make especially early in the career as they learn the complex art of product management:
(1) Thinking of yourself as the idea person
Ideas can come from anywhere. As a product manager, it’s not just your responsibility to come up with ideas i.e solutions to the problems. On the contrary, you should encourage everyone in the team: design, engineering, analytics, marketing, and other support functions to come up with ideas. This shouldn’t just be nice to have but rather an expectation that these functions are brainstorming solutions. Your role as a PM is first to define the problem clearly and crisply and then to rally the team to find a solution. But the actual solutions, can and should come from everywhere.
(2) Not working on improving your writing skills
Writing well is a skill that product managers must actively work on especially early on. In a post-pandemic remote-first world, writing is 90 % of the communication. Whether you are writing a 1-pager for leadership, sending an email to the company, or drafting a product spec, writing is how you communicate as a product manager. If you write well, it’s your super-power, and if you don’t write well, it’s holding you and the team back. The earlier you start working on it, the more of a headstart you get.
(3) Trying to solve multiple problems at once
Lack of clarity on what problems to solve is a very common mistake product managers make. It reflects in the documents you write and the products you will build. Usually, I can tell that this is the case by looking at the home page or main screen of a product. If it’s not obvious what is the next action the product wants the users to take, the product is likely solving multiple problems at once. As a result, it’s leaving the users confused by giving them multiple next steps. Great products don’t leave it to users to decide what actions to take next. For eg. look at the first two screens from the language learning site Duolingo:
it’s obvious what Duolingo wants you to do next on each of these screens. If a product naturally solves two problems, even in that case, its important to be clear what is the primary problem you want to solve
(4) Not doing first hand user research
You need to understand the user’s pain points better than anyone else on the team. Yes, its means that you need to do it better than even the UX researcher and designers on your team when it comes to understanding user pain point. Find a way to be closer to your users.
Depending upon the company and your product, it can mean different things:
- For a Saas product, it can mean speaking with customer success managers regularly
- for an enterprise product, you need to befriend sales, pre-sales and account executives
- For a mass market consumer product, your options are quite varied: find your users in a cafe , street or invite them in your UX lab
Do whatever it takes to listen and speak firsthand with your users. DO NOT entirely depend on written reports sent by UI/UX/PMM teams. You should read these reports but also make sure that you validate them before building an expensive roadmap around those reports.
(5) Not finding empty time on your calendar to think
It was one of the best pieces of advice I received from a colleague who saw me getting drowned in just the operational aspects of product management. These were things like making sure the team has everything it needs to get unblocked, attending standups, planning meetings, weekly reviews, managing backlogs etc.
These are important, but as a product manager, you also are expected to be strategic and layout the future path for the team. And that’s why my colleague thought it was important for me to carve out time on the calendar to do just that. The hard thing about following this advice is, you have to be very intentional about it as it’s really easy to just flow with the regular operational stuff.
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