PM Trails

How to take your manager’s job?

A confident, want-to-win manager needs someone to take her job so she can grow with the business and create space to tackle increasing responsibilities. This realization changed my perspective about successful product managers. To preserve anonymity, I’ll synthesize real examples of good and bad product managers I’ve worked with into two pairs of people.

How should the UI operate?

Engineering may be seeking clarification as they are coding. Pre-sales may be confirming how to address a customer’s need. This question is an opportunity for everyone involved to understand the use case – the aspects of a user’s daily life and their influence on product design and operation. Avoid casual “do it like this” answers that lack sufficient context.

Will our competitor’s announcement hurt us?

A product manager faces questions like these on a daily basis. Her responses, or lack thereof, quickly determine her standing and success in the organization. She is hired to lead with a crisp, reasoned perspective and get others aligned around a common product direction. Executives and peers lose confidence when a product manager punts, expecting others to figure out the bigger picture and make decisions.

What will people use it for?

A product’s user interaction and interface design rely heavily on the PRD to detail the product’s defining use cases. These use cases illustrate core product value and the most common ways the product will be used. Engineering can put features in context and make informed design decisions with clear, focused use cases.