Product Managing a Product Manager Pt.2
By: Robison Rogers
Tags: Product Development, Product, Product Management, Feedback

No, YOU are the product

Welcome to the second part of this series where I attempt to learn about how I’m doing and how I can improve as a product manager. In part 1 I covered the questions that made up my survey and started digging into the feedback I received about how my co-workers view my role.

In this article I will be covering how I scored on the value scale questions and go through the uncomfortable process of consuming feedback I received on how to grow and improve.

The Grid

The three scale questions I asked my peers to rate me on were the following:

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?

In the answers to all 3 questions the lowest I scored on any of the questions was a 7 (2 of them). There were a good number of 8’s and 9’s and the majority were 10’s (sigh of relief). Trying to sift through these scores and come up with a meaning full scoring system was a bit difficult because of how the numbers fell. Even with the semi-anonymous nature of my survey I get the impression that most of my peers wanted to be relatively kind in their feedback. As such I decided to try and grade the scale feedback similar to NPS feedback. Meaning 9’s and 10’s are promoters, 7’s and 8’s are passives and anything lower is a detractor.

In the category of the value my contributions bring to the individuals I scored 14 promoters out of 23

In the category of the value my contributions bring to the company I scored 21 promoters out of 23

In the category of how likely they would be to recommend me to a colleague I scored 21 promoters out of 23

The first thing that jumps out is I scored much lower in the value I bring to individuals than the other areas. I was left asking my self “how much weight I should put into this?” and initially was a bit dismissive about this score. As I stated in part 1, “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”. Our interactions tend to ebb and flow depending on where a product or feature is in the lifecycle.

My takeaways here are twofold, I need to find and create more ways to stay closer to people in other departments and when I do have interactions with them I need to make sure they are quality and impactful interactions. Sharing customers stories, providing updates, receiving customer/product feedback and following up on previous feedback. My hope is making opportunities for each of these will help me bring more value to those I work with.

It was very reassuring to see that scored high on bringing value to the company. After having been here almost 5 years I would hope that I can continue to provide value. With that time comes a lot of tribal knowledge and one thing I’ve been thinking about is how I need to improve on the documentation of the things I’ve learned, my processes, and our product. To help empower those around me and to help “show my work” when it comes to getting buy-in and support around new products and features.

Feedback Dread

I’ll be honest, reading some of the ways to improve was something I wasn’t looking forward to. Part of me felt like I’ve got enough to worry about already and reading about my shortcomings was only going to make me feel like I have more I should be working on, on top of my other work responsibilities. But don’t I owe it to myself (and to some extent my peers) to take time for reflection to make sure I’m not still making the same mistakes and overlooking simple things that can help me become better?

And here is some of the feedback for growth and improvement:

Product

Continued focus on measurable outcomes… discovering ways to learn/fail faster, exploring multiple solutions versus jumping to one.

More direct communication with team members around expectations, timelines, and success metrics.

Themes: Focus on what success looks like and how it is measured, drive outcomes

Sales

Be willing to help get involved with other departments and help move things along faster.

sticking to a timeline/commit once you announce it.

Themes: Reliability and involvement

Engineering

Robison could possibly focus on ways to help his team be more organized and deadline-driven…Anything Robison can do to bring more intense focus to the things he and his team are working on would be a positive in my opinion.

increase punctuality

could benefit from delegating or splitting the scope of product that he covers

Themes: Reduce noise, increase focus, be more deadline and time driven

Marketing

managing workload because it seems like he has a lot on his plate

Onboarding

brief and to-the-point explanations

clearer communication in meetings and presentations, especially when demonstrating how to do something

Themes: Clear, simple communication

Success

more transparent to the customer-facing positions on what is being worked on and how it is being released… CS needs to be aware of these changes and how it will affect our customers so that we can better support them.

preparing members of meetings with questions beforehand, and things to think of before the meeting

being better at responding to slacks and/or emails

Themes: Visibility, meeting preparation, responsiveness

Support

I’d love to see more of a roadmap of what’s planned so we can get an even larger head start on some of it!

more documentation

Themes: Visibility and documentation

Training

focusing more on the user experience for new features

Digesting

Product feedback can be uncomfortable, but it is also very rewarding. While I’ve shared many of the areas I’m falling short in many of these comments were prefaced with things I do well. I couldn’t help but smile as I read words of appreciation and recalling specific experiences I have had with many of my co-workers.

Like managing a product you can’t make improvements unless you get feedback from your customers. This feedback left me looking back at my shortcomings, many of these things seem so obvious in retrospect, but I probably wouldn’t have stopped to recognize them without it being articulated by those I work with. As much discomfort as this caused me what would have been worse is continuing to work the same way and make the same mistakes.

Gathering feedback isn’t the end goal, whether in personal improvement or product management. Gathering feedback is really only the beginning of the process, the end goal is to make changes based on insights gained.

As for me personally I’m still working on how to execute on much of the feedback. I can say that I am trying to make monthly check ins with other departments part of my product/customer feedback, not only when I a new feature headed their way. I’ve also made it a goal to prepare for and provide structure to these interactions (I’ll try to follow up with what it looks like once I’ve developed it further.) Lastly, though it may seem small, I’ve made a goal to attend meetings on time. With remote work I’d found I had developed somewhat of a habit of joining meetings late.

This is a tradition I would like to continue yearly and would challenge anybody that made it this far to give it a try too. I would love to hear any variation or improvements to the questions I used to potentially use in future versions and would love to hear how your own feedback goes. If you made it through both of these articles thank you for your time and I hope at least one of my jokes landed.