I’m at a company that has been acquired by a Fortune 5 company, and we’ve gotten suddenly large from when I started 7 years ago as a developer. Now, I’ve been promoted to a role as a product manager for our platform value stream, and having left the explicit technical work, I’m not entirely sure how to do this job. What are key insights to know whether I’m doing well, and what are the best mechanisms to learn and improve?
Responses
Hi Owen, congratulations on the acquisition and promotion! I'd be interested to hear how and why you decided to move to product after the acquisition, which may help tailor some of the advice I'd have for you.
At a very high level, being a product manager entails (1) understanding what your customer's pain points are (2) having a plan to address these pain points (3) selling this plan and getting buy in from all of the key stakeholders in your area of ownership (4) translating your plan into actionable deliverables (5) understanding how to work with the teams needed to execute the deliverables (6) managing the expectations of all of the key stakeholders so that there are no surprises through launch (7) being able to measure the outcome, translate the results so that your findings are clear to the team, and formulating the next steps based on your findings.
Doing well in this role will be making sure you build up skills to execute in all 7 of these areas. For instance, for (1) you will need to understand the best ways to do user research & synthesize the feedback. For (5) you'll need to understand how work gets done with your cross-functional teammates – if the dev team users agile, understand how they add features into their sprints, for instance.
Two good resources that help break down each of these areas are:
- https://www.mindtheproduct.com/
- https://www.bringthedonuts.com/
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