Hardest thing about Product Management

I am often fascinated by the amount of emphasis that is placed on hard skills for product managers — both during the interview process as well as for the day-to-day deliverables and stakeholder discussions. Having worked in this function for over 3 years now and having interviewed with several companies in the duration, it seems there is a standard protocol for assessing product managers. It ranges from product strategy or product design case study to discussions/questions on monetization strategies to pricing points to feature prioritisation, etc. depending on the type and stage of product as well as the company. Some companies also have technical or business rounds of to assess technical capability and business acumen of product managers. There is no doubt that all of these hard skills are truly very important to succeed in the role as one needs to make fast-paced decisions taking into consideration the needs of all stakeholders without full information or data to back the decisions on.

However, I have often felt that soft skills do have a major play in the ultimate success of a product leader. I often bank upon my previous experience as a product manager in a start-up that was still in the MVP stage, and realize that my biggest challenge had been on narrowing down on the most impactful features to be built in the minimum possible time and convincing all the stakeholders that it was the right thing to do. This included defining the feasibility and scope of the product, how the product would look and how users would feel while using our product. Not to forget, making everyone believe that it would be better than any of our competitors and what will be our strategy to gain market share. Plus, the organization had been in the recruiting space for over two decades thus most recruiters (team members) were convinced that they knew best what the user or candidate needs.

What Happens!!

The first thing I encountered was that there was a breadth of feature requests coming in from across engineering, design, human resource, and senior management. Since most of the team members had great expertise in the domain, they were confident that the feature requests were closely aligned to the user goals.

What I did 😓

To solve this, I resorted to data and analytics in order to quantify the value of the qualitative feature-set. Firstly, I created a persona capture form that encapsulated all details about the end user such as: user needs — functional & emotional, motivations, pain-points, attitude, behavior, and trends. The whole organization was invited to share and fill-in the form as per their user understanding.

Secondly, I performed in-depth research on the market size, industry trends, competitive landscape, and external environmental factors. I then clubbed the data captured from the exercise with my research and formulated a persona for the end user. Based on these data, I narrowed down to a feature-set that aligned with the user goals while eliminating the unwanted features. This helped in gaining trust of the team as well as bringing the entire organization onto the same page.

Now, what I needed to do was to freeze on a feature-set for MVP and prioritize them in the order of development. To resolve this, I created a matrix with each feature evaluated on 3 parameters: value to the user, size of the feature and time complexity needed for development. Performing a trade-off on these parameters, I was able to stack rank the features for MVP.

The remaining part was figuring out what constituted a delightful experience for the user. For this, I sat down with the design team and ensured a simple onboarding, easy navigation, and personalized user experience that resonated emotionally with the user while he was using our product. I made sure that we tested our assumptions by conducting surveys and usability studies on the invision prototype. It not only helped me better understand user’s motivation to do certain things but also how they interacted with the product. I was thus able to validate that the feature-set freezed for MVP resonated with the mindset of the user.

The result 🏆

These insights helped me carve out a clear long-term product vision and thus form an objective roadmap. It also helped me answer strong questions such as: who, what, and why of building the product. Armed with data, I was able to explain how the MVP aligned with the overall company strategy. I also outlined the metrics to track to measure the success of the product in the beginning thus enabling management see the overall scope of the product.