FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

The four levers of product management: succeeding as a product manager

Every aspiring product manager needs to know what it means to be a strong and effective product manager and how they can create value for the team. To be a productive product manager, one needs to understand how the four levers of people, focus, processes, and culture combine to discover and deliver effective solutions to customers.

Behind every great product, there are great product managers or mini-CEOs.

A great product manager needs to understand that four key levers define the success of a product team. Those levers are:

• People: the structure and roles of strong product teams
• Focus: what a strong product team should be working on
• Processes: maintaining operational efficiencies using processes that repeatedly deliver success
• Culture: built around continuous innovation and change

Lever 1: succeeding with people — the structure and roles of strong product teams

Every product begins with a handful of cross-functional people working as a product team. The correct definition and understanding of each member’s roles and the type of people recruited will be key to a product team’s success or failure. To succeed with people, product managers:

• Understand the core principles that make strong and effective product teams
• Know their roles and responsibilities as product managers
• Recognize the role of product leadership, hold them accountable, and use them effectively to move the product forward
• Understand who they will be collaborating with, and to what extent, and align expectations accordingly
• Structure their teams for optimum performance

Lever 2: building the right product — what a strong product team should be working on

For a strong product team to succeed, it needs to have the right focus and know what it should be working on. In other words, to have a clear definition and understanding of what it wants to be developing and why.

To get to that point of clear focus, product teams:

• Need to move away from roadmaps that are output-based and towards outcome-based ones
• Define a compelling and inspiring product vision and tangible strategies for delivering that vision
• Set objectives using techniques such as OKR that keep teams nimble and accountable and aligned with the vision and strategies

Lever 3: maintaining operational efficiencies — using processes that repeatedly deliver success

Effective product teams repeatedly use a combination of the same techniques, activities, best practices, and mindsets to discover and deliver products. These processes entail:

• Scoping for product discovery
• Planning for product discovery
• Ideation
• Prototyping
• Idea testing
• Managing operations at scale through communication
• To effectively execute day-to-day product management processes, product managers need to understand what Design Thinking is and how it works

Lever 4: building the right culture

All the previous levers will only work well when they are in the right product culture environment. Product culture means how product teams behave, what their environment looks like, and how they are best utilized to bring change to organizations.

• Building a strong and effective product culture
• Cultural transformation tactics in large organizations through product teams

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