Product Managing a Product Manager Pt.1
By: Robison Rogers
Tags: Product Development, Product, Product Management, Feedback

YOU are the product

Product Management work extends beyond your product peers and engineers. Product managers should be interfacing with almost every department in an organization. One of the biggest reasons is other departments are great sources of feedback for your products. Sales, Onboarding, Customer Success/Support, and Marketing all have unique perspectives. They also experience the products you work on and the customers you serve at different times in the customer journey.

Sales and Onboarding — dealing with setting expectations and initial exposure to the product

Support and Customer Success — helping customers get the most value out of the product and overcome issues

Marketing — Engaging new and existing customers on new and existing features

As you can imagine these departments all have unique perspectives of what a product manager’s job is.

This thinking lead me to set out to product manage myself. Viewing myself as the product, I asked some of my customers (co-workers) how I (the product) am doing (delivering value) and what areas need improvement.

My approach to this was inspired by one of my co-workers who asked me to fill out a short assessment on the value they bring me and the company. It was such a simple, concise way to measure how they were doing. Using that assessment I decided to carry out my own version along with some additional questions to let me know how to improve.

Note: This is part 1 of what will be a two part series. In part one I’ll be covering my approach to receiving feedback and start digging into some of the feedback. In part 2 I will cover the rest of the feedback I received.

Survey Says…

Name two other past Family Feud hosts… I’ll wait

These were the questions I included in my survey:

On a scale of 0–10, how valuable have my contributions been to you?

On a scale of 0–10, how valuable have my contributions been to the company?

On a scale of 0–10, how likely is it that you would recommend me to a colleague?

Please provide feedback about me, especially areas for growth and improvement.

What is your understanding of my role as a Product Manager?

What department are you in?

The last two questions were my personal additions. The second to last question I added to learn what expectations my co-workers have for my role. The last question I included to see if there was variation in how people in different departments responded. Adding this question did make the responses somewhat less anonymous, but more useful in my opinion, with one of my goals being to identify ways to improve with each department.

I identified a couple of people from each department to get a good sample size and to make sure I wasn’t only asking people I work with closely. I ended up with 23 responses across Product, Engineering, Training, Onboarding, Sales, Customer Success, and Customer Support.

What do I do?

The first question I’ll dive into is “What is your understanding of my role as a Product Manager?”. Again hoping to gain a greater understanding of what expectations my co-workers have for me in my role. Below I’ve included excerpts from answers from individuals in each department along with some of the themes I noticed in their answers.

Product

To use equal measures of advocacy for the customer and business to achieve results. To find the balance between serving business needs and customer needs.

Delight the customer in hard to copy margin enhancing ways.

Themes: Customer advocacy and delight, achieving business results

Training

creating and improving new products and features that the customer wants

Bringing new features to the market

Themes: Launching new products and features

Onboarding

owns the product/feature(s) and is responsible for explaining the best practices for usage and the value to our customers.

build product out that will benefit our company and customers

Themes: Understanding customer needs and building valuable products for the customer and company

Sales

To make sure product is developing the right product and getting it out on time.

Prioritize and push products that generate additional income to the company — work with teams to align expectations and goals.

Accountable for all aspects of the product & making sure the moving parts come together

Themes: Building the right things, managing expectations and delivering

Engineering

Represent the customer.

…ensuring we build/deliver the top notch products that our customers want.

…high level vision for the product within his domain space, and continually drive to improved it.

Themes: Customer advocacy, delivering value, and product vision

Success

To make sure product is developing the right product and getting it out on time.

Deliver a product that is great for our customers.

Pushes his team to find better and more creative ways to make these features better for our customers.

Make sure products are functioning free of bugs and are always looking at different ways to improve the product for the customer.

Themes: Delivering on time, creative solutions, and product quality

Support

works to improve the product and giving our customers more accessibility.

communicating with other departments to make updates and transitions as easy as possible

develops products to better enhance customer experience and also internal experience

Gathering info on what could make our product more valuable for the customers

Themes: Improve products, cross department communication, create good experiences internally

Takeaways

This feedback along with some of my working experiences with these people led me to some of the following takeaways.

Focus more on outcomes with other departments. It’s less about delivering new features and more about providing value in creative ways. For many departments our involvement revolves around new features. It has me thinking about how I need to keep other departments involved in other parts of the product lifecycle. Mainly the discovery and tweak it/enhancement phases. Their feedback being centered on shipping new features has lead me to believe that much of my focus may have also been placed here and that’s why they have responded they way they do.

With sales particularly I got the sense that they want predictability. They want to know what is being delivered and when they can start selling it. They need as much clarity as I can provide as early as possible. Coming back to being reliable.

I need to constantly be an advocate for our customers. If I don’t share customer stories, pains, and ideas with those around me (especially management) they may go unseen. It’s up to me to make sure feedback and insights I receive and find reach the right people.

As I’ve gone through this I’ve realized just how much there is to unpack with all of this feedback. Part of it is probably because this is the first time I’ve done something like this in my current role. I imagine future efforts to run this same survey will be easier to digest having one under my belt and somewhat of a baseline for how things went the first time. Also future attempts will give me an opportunity to measure if and how I’ve improved.

As you may have noticed I haven’t yet covered all of the questions. I’ll be covering the rest of the survey in part 2 of this article, where I’ll cover how I scored on the value scale questions and dive into feedback on how to grow and improve.