If you want to be a successful Product Manager, you’re going to need strong communication skills. You need to be ready and willing to collaborate regularly. And you always need to be looking for new insights from new angles.
Product managers are ultimately problem solvers. They need to gather as much information as they can to deliver the best solution possible, and they need to iterate their solutions as demands and conditions change.
Getting started as a Product Manager can be overwhelming, but we have five tips to help you put your best foot forward.
1. Align your product strategy with your company goals
Each company has an individual vision. No matter how great your product is, if it doesn’t match that vision, someone’s going to be unhappy with you.
Figure out how your company measures success and how your product is supposed to support overarching business goals and objectives.
Take the time to understand what matters most to your executive team, and be prepared with hard evidence if you decide the best thing for the company is to shift strategies. Staying on the same page with your higher ups is going to make your days a heck of a lot easier.
2. Talk with all kinds of customers
Your users are your greatest resource. The people using your product for real-world purposes are always going to have more insight into how effective your product is than you are.
While it might seem strange at first to reach out to customers directly, you’ll find that many of your most active users are happy to share their thoughts with you, especially if it leads to new features or bug fixes that solve everyday issues in their lives.
User testing and surveys are a great way to engage with customers and prospects to figure out how your customers interact with your product in real life. You’ll find that a lot of the assumptions you had about your users and how they work with your product are totally wrong. And, you’ll learn more than you ever could sitting around imagining what it would be like to be them. Don’t imagine; just ask.
3. Listen to your Sales and Support teams
Your Sales and Support teams talk to more customers than you ever will. Questions that might seem too broad to speculate on or require a lot of research can often be answered simply by sitting down with your nearest Sales rep and asking them what customers are thinking.
Same goes with support; if you’re wondering how users are using your product, what questions they have, and what your product’s pain points are, you’ve just found your product prophet.
4. Walk the walk: use your product
It’s one thing to have a high-level understanding of your products functions, capabilities, and limitations. But you’ll get a whole new world of insight if you actually use it.
Suddenly, functions that worked like a dream on paper will stop making sense when you’re faced with a real-world task. You’ll gain a lot of empathy for your customers, and you’ll have a better chance of seeing and correcting problems quickly.
5. Research lots of products, not just your competitors
Free trials are an amazing way to get to know all kinds of products out there on the market. Often, we get stuck in a bubble, thinking only of our direct competitors. We forget to look for inspiration outside of our own industry.
We can learn a lot from how other products approach problems. Never stop testing new products, and never lose your curiosity for how teams work together to build the things they do.
Next time you find a product or website you love, figure out what makes it so great. You can learn a lot about design, workflows, copy, marketing, and more just from regularly viewing beautiful websites. You can also learn a lot about what you don’t like.
What do you think are the most important skills for a Product Manager to have? Let us know on Twitter!