On Product Management

Guest Post: Do you have a roadmap for your Product Managers?

NOTE: The following is a guest post from Leslie McKay.

If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

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There’s little doubt that Product Managers are kept quite busy in their roles.  And certainly their managers (Directors, VPs etc.)  are as busy or busier.

Weeks can fly by spent fulfilling the various demands of the job, including  competitive reviews, strategic discussions, customer visits, roadmap resolution meetings, the latest crises, etc.  But despite the hectic pace, those Directors and VPs need to remember that they manage people in addition to products.

As a people manager, can you answer the following questions about your team members?

• Do you know if your product managers are satisfied with their jobs?
• Do you know their career goals?
• Do you have discussions with your product managers about new trends in product management or in your industry?
• Do you know what are the biggest strengths of your product managers? Their weaknesses?
• What are you doing to help them develop stronger skills in areas where they are weaker?
• Do your product managers need additional training? If so, do you know what type of training do they need?

And finally, do you talk to your product managers about these topics more often than the annual review required by your Human Resources department?

If you don’t have the answers to most of these questions, you probably aren’t managing your people as well as you manage your products.

Good product managers are hard to find and even harder to replace, so you need to make sure that you are helping your them develop the skills they need to go on to the next level in their career path, whatever they want that to be.

This entails more than just keeping tabs on what your staff is doing on a weekly or monthly basis.  You need to expose your product managers to opportunities where they can learn and grow.  For example:

• Make sure your product managers are heavily involved in roadmap development and negotiations. This is a difficult process that only gets better with practice.  Even though it may seem more expedient to limit these discussions to fewer people, it is important for your team members to get this experience and start learning how they may approach this process in the future.

• Strategic discussions are also topics that may be limited to a select few executives in the company.  But it is just as important for your product managers to understand why a particular strategy was chosen as it is for them to understand the strategy itself.  In addition, your product managers can contribute to the process by doing some of the legwork.  They can provide some competitive or market information, and of course, they can provide insightful perspectives on the biggest pain points that your customers are struggling with.

• Have your product managers take the lead on business case development for large and small projects your company is considering.  The analyses that support these efforts can expose your product managers to all kinds of research.  They can also learn how to take several disparate pieces of data and combine them into a cohesive story that can be presented to executives for approval.

• Plan to send your product managers to at least one training event a year.  The events may be focused on product management, technology, leadership skills, etc.  Work with your product managers to determine the best training opportunities to help them grow.

When determining the best ways to develop and nurture your staff, think about what skills they will need to eventually replace you someday.  This will help them to advance to the next level in their career, and it will help you grow your staff into a stronger organization.

Leslie

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Leslie McKay is a senior product manager in the Pittsburgh area.  She has managed a variety of B2B software products, including Web-based applications and embedded mobile software solutions, that are sold to customers around the globe. You can contact her at mckay.lg@gmail.com.

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