How To Work Through Ambiguity Like A Product Manager

Learn how to dispel the fog of war and figure out what to build next in order to chart a path forward for your team

The way to your team’s success is often littered with little speed bumps, double-backs, twists and turns that all work together to stop you from creating progress. These blockers along the way can come in the form of known risks, such as stakeholders having different opinions about what your team should build, or changing market conditions that forces you to adopt a different strategy and direction for your team.

Often, however, the main road block that tends to stop a product manager from succeeding is simply ambiguity — this is the state of unknown or uncertainty that obscures a team or company’s view on the future state of things and sometimes leads teams into a sense of despair about not knowing what they should build next. It is hard to nail down what this might look like — hence the ambiguous nature — but some examples of this can include:

There is little to no direction from top executives on what the priorities are for the company;
Customers are no longer complaining about pain points or providing feedback about opportunities that the team can explore;
Analyzing quantitative data does not yield any results, as either the data is too inconclusive to act on or everything looks fine even after intense scrutiny;
And more…

The list can be exhaustive in terms of the types of ambiguity or uncertainty that a product manager can phase. I can summarise it as:

“A product manager not knowing what they should build next as all the usual inputs are not providing the same level of information required to take the next step.”

This scenario can be the death knell for product managers — not knowing what to do next demoralises the team and forces you to completely halt doing work. Not doing any work means that nothing is being shipped, and the confidence of the team in the product manager starts to take a nosedive, undermining the ability of the product manager to positively influence the behaviour and direction of the team. Nothing being shipped tends to mean the product manager is not showing outcomes, and is instead shown the door out of the company.

In order to avoid the above situation, there are a few tips and tricks that a product manager can adopt in order to cut through ambiguity and to still chart a way forward for the team:

Refer back to the company or department’s goals and objectives

When faced with uncertainty about what you should be building next, a product manager should return to first principles. Namely — what the team builds should ultimately link back to the overall goals and objectives of the company. Even if a product manager does not feel like they are getting high level signals from executives on where the priorities lie, the company objective or goal is usually pretty clearly spelled out for all to see in a publicly accessible charter or an internal wiki that all employees can point to as the reason for them coming to work every morning.

Using the company objective, a product manager should be able to not only understand the types of problems that the company is trying to solve, but to also build out a mental picture of the kind of discovery that they can undertake in order to validate the problem space that the company objective is trying to encompass. Even just looking at what the company goal is provides clear direction in terms of what problems a company is trying to solve, why they are trying to solve those problems, and the role that a product manager can play in this is to figure out the types of solutions that need to exist in this space in order to solve said problems to achieve the overall company goal or objective.

Conduct competitor analysis and figure out where your product falls short

As mentioned above, looking at a company objective or goal can help give you a sense of direction over what you should build next. To augment this, a product manager should involve themselves in competitor analysis, to not only figure out how their product compares to other offerings in the same market, but to also understand where they can offer a different edge or where they fall short compared to other products in the market.

By undertaking this analysis, this helps to cut through some of the sense of ambiguity over what the team should build next, as looking at competitors will help unearth if there are any problems that they have successfully solved, which your product may not, or where your product might have a solid edge over what they provide that — combined with understanding your company’s overall objective or goal — helps to nudge a product manager to build capabilities and to explore opportunities to either close the gap to competitor products or to continue strengthening key offerings so that competitors will not be able to catch up.

Combining both an analysis of the company objective, and considering what competitors are building in this space, will not only give the product manager the ‘why’ we are building solutions for customers, but looking at competitor offerings will also provide the product manager the ‘what’ should be built in order to bridge the gap or strengthen current product offerings.

Brainstorm with your team and share the burden

Finally, although a product manager is expected to provide as much direction to the team at all times, it is also worth noting that a product manager is not meant to be the only person in the team that provides direction. In teams, there is usually what is called a product trio — which consists of representatives from engineering (typically an engineering manager), design (typically a senior or lead designer) and product (which are product managers) — and each of these functions work in tandem to not only figure out what the team should build next

When faced with uncertainty, and armed only with some direction from looking at the company goals and conducting competitor analysis, the other best course of action for a product manager is to discuss with the product trio and figure out the best ways that can be taken in order to cut through obscurity and ambiguity. Some product managers refuse to do this, believing it to be a mark of weakness and defeat that they are not the ones that are capable of setting direction.

I believe that the opposite is true. A product manager was never meant to be the only person that facilitates direction for the team. Instead, as it is for most of the software development lifecycle, these decisions should be taken in unison with other members of the team — particularly the leadership in the form of the product trio — so that the expertise and experience of the other members of the product trio can help the product manager reflect what might be the next best thing to work on. This also helps alleviate pressure on the product manager thinking that they have to do all this work alone when, in fact, the product manager is backed by an entire team in order to succeed, which is something that should be taken into account when trying to chart a path forward in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity.

Conclusion