Last year I wrote a short essay summarizing my first 365 days as a Product Manager. One more year has passed, and it is time to share more insights or learned lessons.
Important notice: It is only about my experience, so some things may not apply to what other PMs are experiencing. Product Management is a vast discipline with different responsibilities across different companies and industries.
I fell into a common trap of every manager: obsession with performance metrics. Since I have been promoted to the PO role my responsibilities include tracking stats related to the backlog and team performance. That includes the team’s capacity, estimates, velocity, and other specific metrics. In an ideal world, the estimation of planned features matches capacity, the team performs a predicted velocity and (more importantly) delivers features in time. But we all know that doesn’t work this way.
This is the story of how I became obsessed with numbers instead of being obsessed with a product. And how I overcame that and shifted my focus to real value.
Throughout my career, I participated in the development of a few supplements for so-called “parent” products. They were standalone services with their own, not big, but still considerable business value. Recently I realized that even though those supplement products were developed in different organizations and in different business areas they did have common traits. Moreover, they shared the same problems.
It was something laying on the surface. Sometimes you shoot yourself in the foot twice before starting to see obvious things. What is the nature of those Sidekick products and do they inherit the problems of “bigger brothers”? Let us sort it out in this essay.
One year has passed since I was promoted to a Product Manager position: first six months as an Associate (a Junior grade), and then I stepped in as a fully-fledged Product Manager. And that was a drastic shift that made me revisit some aspects of my work and added a new dimension to my view on product development.
In this essay, I want to summarize my experience with the insights I collected throughout the year. Some of them might be obvious to a more experienced audience. But for me, some were revelations, and some were hugely underestimated initially. It is a good exercise to conduct such a personal retrospective, and others can benefit from that as well.