As product managers we are juggling many different tasks. We are moving from high level to details, from customer meetings to design, from strategic discussions to bugs prioritization all in one day.
But what are the 3 most important things a good product manager must do?
1. Bring the customers to the table. Any table. I am not only talking about representing the customers in front of developers, architects, R&D managers and QA in every single meeting you have. I am talking about letting your R&D really know your customers. Your job is to make sure they understand who is your customer and what problem you are trying to solve for him. Bring them to meetings with customers, introduce them to customers usecases and issues, if you can actually let them be a customer for a day - that's awesome. I believe this is the best motivator for a developer to actually get engaged with the code he writes. You might be surprised but he can come up with productive suggestions to solve customer problems as well as letting you know you are making a mistake in the way you are designing a feature right on the starting point.
2. Prioritize. You need to know how to prioritize the feature requests that are coming from customers, QA, support and PS against fixing bugs and improving the quality. Prioritization is done daily. It may seem like an easy task but it is probably the hardest one. You have to focus and make hard decisions and to be brave about it. Everything is important. Very important. Questions are what is MORE important? What can you leave without? What can't you leave without? Make sure you keep in mind quality and support. Don't neglect those. Once you will scale, this is the first thing you will regret and will cost you money.
3. Be creative. We need to come up with a creative way to solve our customer problems. It should be creative in several ways. It should get the best ROI. It should be cool, simple and easy to use. It should make our customers happy. This is our job. To solve their problems in a way that will make them happy. Not necessarily in the way they want. Make sure you are not adding more and more buttons and options. Make sure you are not building an over flexible product that will make your customers miserable. You need to think hard and make some tough decisions for your customers in order to save them time and effort in making those decisions themselves.
We have many more tasks and roles. In my opinion, these are the 3 key ones. Without those, you can't really do a great job as a product manager. Make sure you are prioritizing your tasks the way you are doing for the product features. Focus on the MOST important tasks.
