Customer Support for a Day

As product managers, we solve problems for users – both new users and existing users. One of the best ways to get to know existing users better is to work alongside customer support.

Customer support teams interact directly with existing customers that are struggling. This means that customer support has a wealth of information about the challenges that existing customers face, and what kinds of solutions are more likely to satisfy the needs of existing customers.

Not only that, customer support teams are truly product champions – they promote the effectiveness of the product and actively soothe the customers who are most likely to churn. Therefore, better empathizing with customer support enables you to be a more effective product manager. Continue Reading

Product Managers Are Also Products

When I work with product managers, I strongly believe that the most valuable product they ship is themselves. In other words, product managers are also products.

In fact, I’d go so far to say that while product managers are also products, they might be the most impactful product that their company creates. After all, product managers are the means through which better products are made – therefore, better product managers make for even better products.

In a world where competitive barriers continue to drop, the difference between a good product and a great product can mean life or death for a company. That’s why there’s such a high premium on great product managers.

Therefore, whenever someone asks me about career advice within product management, I ask them: “How would you make yourself a better product?” Continue Reading

Data-Driven vs. Data-Informed

Many product organizations have stopped focusing on being data-driven, and are pivoting towards being data-informed instead.

What’s the difference between the two? Let me illustrate with a real scenario.

Product Study: Data-Driven Demand Assessment

One of my past initiatives was to find product-market fit for a particular product idea that we had.

The goal was to use landing pages, SEO (search engine optimization), and SEM (search engine marketing) to determine the following:

  • Was our idea viable?
  • If so, how should we market it, and to what audience?

We already had hypotheses around how to market the product, and what audience we were targeting, since we had already completed extensive qualitative and quantitative research to confirm that our product was solving a real customer pain.

We just needed to find the best way to bring that product idea to market. We decided to use as much quantitative data as possible to measure demand. Continue Reading

How to Sunset a Feature

In the PMHQ Slack community, we regularly get thought-provoking questions that we feel should be explored in-depth and documented for future reference. We’re starting a new set of Q&A posts called Highlights to dive into these kinds of questions, and enable everyone in the community to revisit the answers and contribute further!

“Hi all – I have a 2-part question:

1) What is the threshold of usage to make the decision to remove a feature?

2) If the usage is overall low, but a non-insignificant number of high-paying clients are using it, what is the approach to making this change?“

– Penny Yuan, Sr. Product Manager at Poll Everywhere

Our community of product leaders had lots of great insights to share on this particular topic! Below is the summary of their approaches in removing features. Continue Reading

Internal Release Notes

As product managers, we work with many stakeholders from many different departments within our organization. Our stakeholders rely on us to inform them on what’s happening with the product, as it impacts their operations and their capabilities. I’ve found that one of the most effective ways to keep stakeholders in the loop is to use internal release notes.

Most of us are familiar with release notes in general. Check out Slack’s release notes as a fantastic example.

Here’s one from March 2018:

The release notes clearly describe what was released and why it was released. These external-facing release notes are targeting external users (and also injects a bit of brand personality and fun). Continue Reading

Task Management Best Practices

In the PMHQ Slack community, we regularly get thought-provoking questions that we feel should be explored in-depth and documented for future reference. We’re starting a new set of Q&A posts called Highlights to dive into these kinds of questions, and enable everyone in the community to revisit the answers and contribute further!

“Any tips on how to get started with your day when you have an overwhelming amount of tasks to complete? I practice Inbox Zero and I’m well organized, so that isn’t the issue here.“

– Russell Christensen, Senior Business Analyst at Bankers Healthcare Group

Our community of product leaders had lots of great insights to share on managing overwhelming lists of tasks! Below is the summary of their task management best practices. Continue Reading