Top 10 Mistakes New Product Managers Make
As you start to get your feet wet in the world of product management, certain pitfalls become evident. Here are the top 10 mistakes you should be wary of:
Throughout my career, managing product managers has been one of my most fulfilling endeavors. Witnessing the natural flow of ideas, the nuanced discussions of strategy and execution, and the passion that drives each individual to craft a unique digital experience has been a long list of memories I enjoy reviewing. This hands-on experience, intertwined with the challenges and triumphs, laid the foundation for the Product Protégé Guide. My aim? To encapsulate the distilled wisdom, to illuminate the path for budding product managers, and to ensure that the pitfalls I encountered serve as signposts for others. Between the impact of the mistake and the solution - I try to give some additional context that I hope drives the point home. Let’s dive in…
Early Product Launch Celebrations
Impact: Premature rejoicing might overlook vital post-launch metrics, affecting both customer and business value.
Don’t get excited because you executed and launched a feature. Get excited if you can prove it impacted customer and/or business value. If it failed - tell the story of what was learned!
Solution: After launch, pause to analyze if you've genuinely added value or if there are lessons to be learned. Set expectations with your leadership that it will take time to understand what was learned or if this was a successful launch.
Saying Yes to Everyone
Impact: Prioritizing everyone's requests dilutes the product's core value and skews metrics.
Learn to say “No.” This is an art - it requires a strong grasp on what is most important for your team at the moment, the priority of work you have slated, and if there is a compelling reason to look at the idea being offered; recommend a working session with the person who originated the idea and take them through a pitch deck. To static of a roadmap, you start to look more waterfall and unable to see new trends that should shape your roadmap differently. Too dynamic of a roadmap, your team starts stopping and stops finishing projects and you lose faith from your co-creators that you are a leader willing to lead.
Solution: Utilize the Product Protégé Guide to clearly define product strategy and roadmap, enabling discernment between 'needs' and 'nice-to-haves'.
Feedback from a Narrow Segment
Impact: Catering to a particular segment can lead to a skewed product experience, impacting the overall user base.
If you decide to do user feedback sessions, make sure you talk to as many user types as you can to see how differing opinions from customers should be brought into your backlog.
Solution: Ensure a diverse feedback loop representative of your entire user base to avoid metric distortion.
Not Tapping into Your Squad’s Full Potential
Impact: Using developers just to code misses out on their holistic value, potentially affecting team dynamics.
If you are only using your developer or QA professional to code and test; you are only getting half of their value.
Solution: Seek continuous feedback from your dev, QA, and UX teams, ensuring a harmonious product culture.
Getting Stuck in User Stories and Epics
Impact: Overemphasis on granular tasks can obscure the overall product health. It’s great to have focus on the requirements, but it’s easy to get lost in it and forget why you are writing the epic and user story in the first place.
Keep the big picture in mind for you and your team. Often repeat your vision, strategy, and roadmap and ask your co-creators how what they are working on relates. If it doesn’t, revisit your backlog immediately.
Solution: Periodically step back to assess how individual tasks align with your vision, strategy, and roadmap.
Neglecting Product Hygiene
Impact: Over-focusing on new features, while ignoring tech debt or QA processes, affects the product's longevity and relevant metrics.
Product hygiene isn't just maintenance; it's the foundation of innovation. If you have strong concrete, you can build any house you’d like on it.
Solution: Dedicate time to maintain product hygiene, balancing between new deliveries and tech debt resolutions. Spend the 10% of your QA’s time on automating their test scripts so you can remove mundane tasks and have them focus on widening their test surface area.
Making Decisions in a Vacuum
Impact: Absence of stakeholder collaboration can lead to products misaligned with broader business goals.
Why hide your roadmap and the priorities you have set? You are missing out on valuable feedback that could shape your backlog to be even more impactful, and pick up a few advocates for your team along the way. Strong beliefs, held loosely.
Solution: Engage stakeholders in hypothesis formulation and avoid siloed decision-making. Take the time to set up 1:1s with your various contacts from different business units. Offer to take them through the roadmap and ask for real advice.
Analysis Paralysis
Impact: Spending weeks over-researching when an MVP could be launched in half the time can hamper learning from real users.
Frameworks may be getting in the way if the end result is analyzing to learn instead of launching to learn. High Signal, Low Effort initiatives should be shipped as soon as possible to gather insight. This doesn’t mean that larger LOE efforts shouldn’t be analyzed, but how can you break it down to smaller phases so you can learn from real users, faster.
Solution: Remember, real-world insights sometimes offer more value than prolonged planning.
Imbalanced Management Focus
Impact: Over-managing up or down can affect team morale, product culture, and potential funding opportunities.
Please don’t be the product manager that has poor user stories, shells of epics, never leads in the trenches, but in front of leadership suddenly is an incredible speaker filled with corporate jargon and a painted picture of a vision coming to life.
On the other hand, don’t be the product manager that never speaks about their team in front of leadership, but would rather stay in the trenches and just focus on their requirements and output. Take the time to tell the story of your team!Solution: Aim for a balance: articulate vision, strategy, and roadmap to leadership while being hands-on in removing team hurdles.
Writing Vague User Stories
Impact: Inefficient stories extend refinement hours and hinder team actionability.
You will quickly lose credibility with your team if you spend more time refining a user story than you did actually writing it. While I don’t expect every user story to be 100% going into refinement, it better be 90%+… it will be extremely obvious to your co-creators if you prepared and respected their time.
Solution: With Product Protégé Guide, master the art of crafting succinct user stories, anticipating questions a developer or QA professional might pose.
By recognizing these mistakes and leveraging tools like the Product Protégé Guide, product managers can steer clear of common pitfalls and foster a thriving product environment. Remember, success lies in continuous iteration and learning. Stay sharp and proactive!
For all my non-product manager subscribers, which pitfalls have you seen the most in your career?
Til next week protégés…
