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We are almost on the cusp of the new year and almost everyone is looking forward to 2018 with new hopes and resolutions in their personal/professional lives. It is usually that time of the year where one introspects on their career path and so, as editors of “The Product Success” magazine, we have chosen this month’s theme around what it takes one to become that “Product Manager”, a coveted title/role that one aspires to acquire in his/her career lifetime.

As Martin Eriksson (founder of world’s largest product community) puts it, a “Product Manager” is someone who is at the intersection of Business, Technology, and User Experience.

Business: A Product Manager should have a solid understanding of 3Cs of Business — Customer, Company and Competition and not just about revenues or profitability. Product success is primarily characterized by ‘Customer Delight’ and in Steve Jobs’s words — “If you keep your eye on the profit, you’re going to skimp on the product. But if you focus on making great products, then the profits will follow.”

Technology: A Product Manager should have a decent understanding and a flair for latest technologies to understand and appreciate the effort and complexity involved in building products. Having some technical competency will definitely help product managers in making better decisions.

User Experience: A Product Manager is someone who can imagine and visualize by stepping into the shoes of real end-users keeping the design and experience aspects of the product such as ease-of-use, accessibility, and serviceability. Shaping a product into a great product is in the hands of Product Manager. The great product often starts with a compelling vision that goes beyond addressing the basic expectations of the customer and aims for the higher goal of creating delightful customer experiences.

EDITOR’S NOTE INSIDE

13WHY I’M HAPPY I FAILED MY FIRST PRODUCT MANAGEMENT INTERVIEW 17 minutes ago I was told I wouldn’t be the best fit for a company and I was kind of glad.

19WHAT MAKES A GREAT PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER?A Product Manager (PM) listens to the market and a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) talks to the market.

156 TIPS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERS TO WORK BETTER WITH UX DESIGNERSIn your role as PM, you don’t have any direct authority over most of what makes a product successful.

10SO YOU WANT TO BE A PRODUCT OWNER? How do you get hired as a Product Owner without relevant experience? I’m sharing my story.

04HOW TO GET A JOB AS A PRODUCT MANAGER AND PRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER The answer is simple: Show you can do the job.

21EDITORIAL TEAM

07PRODUCT MANAGEMENT RECRUITMENT Women in Product had a great event last week! We’re covering the best things we learned from the event!

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We all know that Product Manager plays a pivotal role in success (or failure) of the product. But, more important to know is what makes a Product Manager successful? Is there a common competency framework that sets him up for success? What skills and competencies should he/she needs to acquire to become a great product manager? How does one who aspires to become a Product Manager get prepared to crack the interviews? All these and many more questions are answered in detail through our articles of this month’s edition.

Merry Christmas and Happy New year!

From Editorial Team of “The Product Success” Magazine.

Muralidhar SomisettyCo-founder & CTO | WoisesEditor | Prodmagazine.com

EDITOR’S NOTE

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HOW TO GET A JOB AS APRODUCT MANAGER AND PRODUCT

MARKETING MANAGER

“How do I get a job as a product manager and product marketing manager?”

The answer is simple: Show you can do the job.

Being able to demonstrate the competency of a product manager and product marketing manager is the hard part. First, you have to know what competences are

required for each role to be a product manager or a product marketing manager or both. You can get the job description for a product manager here and for a product marketing manager here. Then you have to demonstrate you have the skills, the competencies.

One way is to find someone who will hire you and let you learn on the job.

Having performed the role of Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager for over 75 products and services across multiple markets and industries for the past 47 years, I am often asked, “What do I have to do?”

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Hewlett Packard Product Management

I had such a benefit when Hewlett Packard let me move horizontally into a product marketing manager job (back then everybody was called a product marketing manager which today is split into the titles and roles of product manager and product marketing manager) and learn on the job.

But fewer and fewer companies have the time or the desire to let you learn on the job.

Or Association of International Product Management and Marketing (AIPMM). You could read the Association of International Product Management and Marketing (AIPMM) book of knowledge or ProdBok and find out what a product manager and product marketing manager does.

The Guide to the Product Management and Marketing Body of Knowledge (ProdBOK® Guide)

But that does not teach you “how” to do it… just “what” needs to be done. Where can you learn

“what” to do as a product manager?

To learn “what” to do. You could take any number of courses on the subjects from the likes of Pragmatic, Sequent, Brainmates, General Assembly, 280 Group, the University of California at Berkeley Extension, University of Wisconsin, Institute of Product Leadership and others.

You could also attend pCamps or Product Camps to pick up tidbits of popular interest, but those tidbits tend to be disjointed and provide little in an organized, systematic mature process that is repeatable – the key to product management success.

The Best Way to Learn What to Do as a Product Manager or Product Marketing Manager.

Or…(Warning… unabashed self-promotion coming up) you could:

Take my online courses which cover the entire breadth of the product lifecycle: getting the

PRODUCT MANAGER

Management

PRODUCT MANAGEMENTCOMPETENCIES

ProductManagement

MarketingManagement

Company Values, Vision,CultureCreativity, Ideation & InnovationBusiness Models &PlanningLegal Structures, Contracts& Risk Management

Understanding of customerjourneyDifferences between marketsMessagingPromotions/Packaging/BundlingMedia and MixDistribution Channels

Training Sales and SupportPlanningSales ToolsSales PlanningPublic Relationship PlanningAdvertising PlanningContent Planning

Social Media PlanningMetrics and AnalyticsSchedule and Budget

Product Life Cycle Framework& ProcessKnowing what youe customers& customer’s customer “DO”Product that will do faster, better & cheaper (Innovation)Identified risks & mitigationstrategies

Clear value propositionKnowing your targeted Customers [Personas]Understanding your markets,competitors & technologicalchangesProduct Positioning

Product features, benefits ofthose features and advantagesover the competitionPricing StrategyProduct RoadmapDistribution ManningPlanning budget and scheduleReturn on Investment

Order FulfillmentFinance & AccountingSales & NegotiationsSupply ChannelsLeadership & ManagementStaffingSupportOrganizational Structure

Entrepreneurial MarketingSocial Media & OnlineMarketingSame as ProductManagement & ProductMarketingPLUS Everything below

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company organized, discovering the key things your product should do for your customers, innovation, value proposition, product market strategy, marketing and social media marketing. Go here.

Do the accompanying workbooks for each for your own product, or I can give you a case study and a product idea you can use for your study. (If done well, these products could be turned into real ones, and you will have laid the necessary groundwork for starting your own company.)

Let me review your work and give you feedback (Included in the price of the course). If you do a good job on the workbooks, then I will give you a personal letter of recommendation you can show to your prospective employer along with the plan you developed showing you know “how” to do the job. Each course will give you a “certificate of completion” you can show on your Linkedin profile and to your prospective employer.

Then go to work on your resume including citing results you have accomplished with numbers, use active verbs and cut out anything that distracts from what the hiring manager is trying to find.

You are Hired as a Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager.

I’ll bet, if you follow the directions above, you WILL get hired, since you will have demonstrated you know what you need to do and how to do it.

And then there is the cost both regarding time and money.

Regarding time, each of the providers listed above will take you 2-3 days to several weeks to go through their courses. In most cases, you will learn “what” needs to be done and little on “how” to do it. It is the “how” that is most important.

What I say here is from personal experience. I was teaching one of those other company’s courses (which I also helped write), to the Botswana Telecommunications Company. About two days into the three-day class, one of the junior product managers asked if we could go

through filling in the product plan template in detail. Out of the three days of training, we got to spend only about 45 minutes on that task which greatly frustrated them. You see, the lectures were all about the “what” and not the “how”. Plus they were all lectures with almost no time for practice, discussion and collaboration.

With Spice Catalyst’s courses, it will take you about four to five days to go through all the courses. But you can do it in manageable bites of less than 20 minutes each at a time if you want and at your pace. If you want to hear/see the lecture again, you can do so at any time, including the updates.

To do the plans, it will take about 4-5 months of effort to develop a really good–and comprehensive–plan that will work in the marketplace. It is difficult. It is hard work to make sure you will have a successful product or service.

Regarding money, the others will cost you several thousands of dollars, and often more. My course is substantially less. Less than $120 for all five courses. They include what I have learned from my experience.

Do you have what it takes to be in a position to earn over $100K a year and get the fundamentals of what it requires to be a CEO and an entrepreneur?

It is up to you.

If you believe you can, then the ball is in your court!

Make it happen!

Go here to get started.

David FradinPrincipal | www.spicecatalyst.comEditor | Prodmagazine.com

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT RECRUITMENT

Below, we’re covering the best things we learned from the event!

Resumes and Cover LettersA resume is always a must! But depending on the

company, a cover letter can really sell your story and express your passion. Smaller companies tend to actually read cover letters, whereas larger companies have so many applicants, that reading cover letters are simply unrealistic.

A 360-DEGREE PERSPECTIVE SPONSORED BY WOMEN IN PRODUCT

Women in Product had a great event last week! With product leaders from Zenfolio, WikiHow, and PagerDuty, there were great insights about what it takes to get a job as a product manager and how to succeed as a PM.

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In your resume…

• Demonstrate your career journey and progression throughout your resume to show that you’re advancing and continue stepping up to learn more, take on more, and grow

• Always make sure you tailor your resume to the job description! This should be a given, but read the entire job post and make sure your resume addresses those needs

• Make sure you can show that you know how to solve problems successfully and have a proven track record of doing so

But for those companies who do read cover letters, we have a few tips…

• Make it customizable — tailor your cover letter to fit the job description and what the company is looking for, proving that you can meet the company’s needs and help them solve their biggest problems

• Demonstrate that you can dig into customer issues and solve them, specifically point out problems that you think that the company might have and try to solve them

• Show that you discovered problems, solved them, and made an impact on not only your product but the business

• Include interesting things and what you’re passionate about to stand out and show that you’re a person!

• Learn about the company’s culture and what they value and be sure to include that in your cover letter!

Applying• When applying, find someone you know

who works at the company, who can get you connected and put in a good word

• Do informational interviews! These are a great way to get to know the company and what they are looking for before you actually apply

• Go to networking events! You will gain a lot of perspectives and meet new people who may be able to help you out!

InterviewingWe learned a lot about interviewing at the event, but here are some highlights of what you should be prepared to answer and what you should be prepared to discuss and demonstrate:

• Ah, a common question! “What would you do with x, y, z product?”

• Make sure you know the competition, the company’s mission, its priorities, its product lines, and its users

• Make it sound like you already work there during the interview — that you’ve done your research and have thought about what problems they are facing and how to solve them, but don’t be too negative!

• Be prepared to talk about hypothetical situations and what you’d do in those situations. Also be prepared to discuss what you did in previous situations at previous companies and why you made the choices you did.

• Make sure you discuss data and metrics!

• Think about using a methodology for answering questions, that way you can communicate clearly and concisely!

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Traits of a Good PMSo what does it take to be a good product manager? A lot, it turns out! For example…

• You have to be a good listener, consolidate what you’re hearing, distill the information, and make a decision

• You need to be able to talk about the vision, inspire your team, align your team and stakeholders, possibly get funding… What this boils down to is leadership. Be a good leader!

• You’ll also need to demonstrate that you can own your product end to end, execute, follow-through, and solve problems. Basically, GET THINGS DONE.

• You have to be obsessed with your user and have empathy for their pain points so you can create a great user experience

• Demonstrate that you can think critically, take different points of view, and then prioritize features that will have the biggest impacts.

• Show that you went above and beyond your role, consistently.

Technical Skills for PMsWhile the above is mostly soft skill based, technical skills are no less important to strong product managers. Here are some of the technical skills you’ll need to demonstrate in the role:

• Using data is a bare minimum. Instead, you’ll need to really understand data. Ask WHY. Ask questions, understand patterns, and suggest hypotheses that you’d want to test based on that data. Be prepared to tell a story with data!

• Always be aware of your goals and how the data ties to KPIs.

• Make sure you triangulate your data with intuition and user interviews.

• You’ll also need to know how to relate and inspire your designers and engineers!

What skills do Senior PMs have?While this list could be extensive, senior PMs have a few skills that really set them apart from more junior product managers.

• They have executive presence — they can be credible in front of an executive team and tell them this is what we should be doing and why.

• They also have people management experience, because they might be managing a team of PMs.

So after all of this, how do I make the transition to a PM?Whew! That’s a hard question, but there are definitely some routes that you can take to help you get there!

• Think of all your experience and relate it to what a product manager does, showing that you may not have a PM title, but you sure have done the role!

• Find a mentor! This person can guide you and help you with your resume and interview.

• Build a mobile app!

• Create a draft of a feature with a proposed roadmap and send that to companies you’re interested in.

• Become a product manager of something you’re not getting paid for

• At your current company, learn from the product managers and try to make the transition there, since they already know you and your work!

So are you ready to take the leap into product management?

Shelby StewartPassionate about ProductAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

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SO YOU WANT TO BE APRODUCT OWNER?

How Did I Know I Wanted To Become A PO?

6 years ago I was working as a Marketing Manager for a start-up. I was closely involved with the development of a sophisticated online health check. After working directly with a development team on a product I was hooked. I knew this was

what I wanted to do: I wanted to build cool things.

My manager wanted to promote me to be their first PO, as he saw I had a knack for product development when I was closely involved with rebuilding their whole platform.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM LANDING MY FIRST JOB AS A PRODUCT OWNER.

It took me 4 years to get my first job as a Product Owner (PO) at a Dutch start-up called Bynder. I was their third PO hire. Landing this job required a lot of persistence and dedication. How do you get hired as a Product Owner without relevant experience?

I hope by sharing my story it will be easier for others to get hired as a PO.

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Unfortunately my employer went through difficult financial times. So I did not become a PO after all. I was very disappointed and decided to focus my energy to get hired somewhere else as a PO.

Lesson 1: Try To Get Promoted Internally

The best way to get hired as a PO is to get promoted internally. I missed the boat, but I still feel this would have been the easiest way to start my career in PO. My path was much harder, but I learned valuable skills along the way I would have not learned otherwise.

When you start as a PO at your current company, they trust you and your capabilities. You will have more time to get up and running. Usually you will have a lot of valuable domain knowledge, which new PO hires may not have. This will grant you some more patience, plus they will spend more time mentoring you on the PO role as they realize you still need to learn a lot.

The alternative to getting promoted internally, is applying without prior experience. That can be quite difficult.

Applying As A PO Without Experience

I was not very appealing as an applicant for Product Owner jobs. I had no background in IT and knew very little about developing software. My Masters in Life Sciences did not add a lot of value either, other than indicate that I had a reasonable degree of persistence and intelligence.

Back in 2010, there were very few entry-level PO jobs, so every vacancy asked for experience. The job market was flooded with applicants more experienced than me. Foolishly, I still decided to apply to PO positions and surprise: I did not get invited anywhere.

Plan A was not working and I needed a plan B. My plan B was to get a job that would act as a stepping stone to get the job I wanted. So what kind of job should I apply for?

Lesson 2: Pick A Stepping Stone

Based on my limited experience of working with developers, I realised my technical understanding was quite poor. When I asked our developers how difficult it was to build something, it would feel like I was listening to the Swedish chef:”BORK BORK BORK”. I heard complete gibberish.

Improving my technical understanding felt like a good place to start. My reasoning was: if you can’t communicate well with developers, how can you work together to build awesome things?

I decided to become a Software Tester. Software testers were very scarce and it was a job you could get into without previous experience. I read a lot about software testing and wrote a decent motivation letter why I would be suited for such a role. I got hired in a couple of weeks and was elated!

Gaining Technical Understanding As A Software Tester

Working as a Software Tester made me understand software development really well. You basically get paid to prevent mistakes and discover all that went wrong during the development process. I became an expert at noticing and preventing failure. I became proficient at making sure we build the thing right.

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As much as I enjoyed discovering as many bugs as possible and improving the development process, I knew I wanted more. I wanted to help build the right thing.

I was working with POs who struggled in their job. POs who were unable to write clear User Stories. POs incapable of speaking on the same level with developers, as they also suffered from the Swedish Chef syndrome. POs who pitched solutions, instead of sharing the problem with developers.

By now my technical understanding was pretty decent and I had a solid understanding what developers needed to do their job well. I wanted to be more involved in what happens before the development team starts working on something.

Lesson 3: Pick Another Stepping Stone If Necessary

I talked to my manager and convinced him to make me a Business Analyst. My pitch was that we could deliver a lot more customer value if we had someone to help write User Stories who actually understood software development and what developers need to do their job well. I received a promotion to Business Analyst.

Doing the Business Analyst role gave me the confidence and credibility to do the PO role well. I was involved with most aspects of the PO role and now had relevant experience to apply as a PO.

So I applied for around 30 PO vacancies and I still was not getting invited anywhere. I was baffled. I had relevant experience and I had applied to so many jobs that my motivation letter and resume reached a level I was inadequate to improve any further. I was stuck and did not know what to do better.

Lesson 4: Getting Hired Is All About Trust

The only conclusion I was able to draw was that they did not have enough trust that I would be able to do the job. The leap of faith they would need to make was too big. So I thought long and hard about how I could make this leap of faith smaller.

I decided to obtain a Product Owner certification.

My assumption was companies would place a lot of value on a certification and it would lend me sufficient credibility. I would not only have the experience, but also a certification to prove I possess enough knowledge.

I obtained the PO certification. I changed a single line on my resume and suddenly I got invited to around 70% of all interviews I applied to. Below my name I added ‘Certified Product Owner’ and made sure the first thing recruiters would see was my certification. I suddenly also got approached by recruiters who wanted to place me at companies. I still had exactly the same experience as before, but my credibility had increased significantly so they placed a higher value on my experience.

With the certification and relevant experience I got the job I wanted within 2 months. If you want to obtain a certification, I have also written a guide that can help you prepare and decide which Product Owner certification to go for.

Landing Your First Product Owner Job Is Hard

It took me 4 years to get my first job as a PO, while I always knew this was what I wanted to do. Maybe I could have taken some more shortcuts, but I was not even aware the role of Business Analyst existed when I applied as a Software Tester.

I really knew almost nothing about software development and had very little technical understanding when I first applied as a Product Owner. When I applied I absolutely knew I was ready as I could be to perform the role without doing it before. If I had gotten the role earlier, maybe it would have been a much tougher ride. So try to make the leap when you feel confident enough you are not setting yourself up for failure.

Maarten DalmijnProduct OwnerAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

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WHY I’M HAPPYI FAILED MY FIRST PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

INTERVIEW

Hearing the words, “On this occasion, we feel you might not be the best fit but we’d love to stay in touch and have another chat in 6-12 months,” should be a complete lead weight drop in the stomach of anyone who is passionate about landing their first Product Management role. However hearing the feedback on why I wasn’t a good fit shouldn’t be an awkward discussion — it should be

a burning catalyst that drives you to nail those skill gaps. In my opinion, the moment of realization was when I was asked about my experience in writing good user stories with acceptance criteria. As a background, the organization and team I’m in now don’t really incorporate good practice user stories in a true agile fashion (which hiring company X were well versed in and practiced this methodology

17 minutes ago I was told I wouldn’t be the best fit for a company and I was kind of glad. You might be asking yourself, “That’s a pretty stupid thing to say” and I’ll tell you why.

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heavier than what I am used to) – so I can’t exactly relate and tell the hiring manager I am comfortable and familiar with writing these. Because I don’t. In fact, when it came to the question my mind went blank and I simply said I didn’t have experience of writing them but I know what they are. Why the hell did that happen? Yes, I know exactly what acceptance criteria is but no I haven’t written them in a professional environment to be implemented on my product. In fact the last time I ‘wrote’ a good practiced user story was at University.

Perhaps this company wasn’t the best fit for me as I was looking somewhere that I could use my current knowledge, pick up the gaps I’m missing from literacy, meetups, and articles written here in medium and implement them in real time so I could make mistakes and learn from them. The one thing I do know is that my next interview (this evening actually) I’m going to be better prepared to not highlight the things I can’t do but the things I can do and am currently developing in my PM skills repertoire. If you are in a setting where you work closely with a Product Manager, get involved and ask about tasks they never manage to get around to doing. PMs should be empathetic and a PM that won’t give you the time to explain what they are doing isn’t the right person to speak to.

The bottom line uses this feedback to grow as a potential PM, apply for companies you feel you might be passionate about so you can easily talk about it and don’t apply for anything that says Product Manager just to get your foot in the door. What I’ve learned from current Product Managers is that the best products are produced by PMs who are passionate and genuinely interested in what they do and what they are trying to achieve.

Finally, two of the best resources I’ve come across include Product Leadership, a book which is co-written by a guy called Martin Eriksson who founded a Product Management city meetup called Product Tank. A must do for anyone interested in becoming a PM.

Thanks for reading and I appreciate any feedback or equally great resources/ideas on how to develop myself!

Neil ArchibaldImplementation AnalystAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

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6 TIPS FOR PRODUCT MANAGERSTO WORK BETTER WITH UX DESIGNERS

The design team owns customer research and product design. Engineering builds the actual product. Marketing and Sales promote the value your team shipped to the world. And Customer Success makes sure your customers’ questions and concerns don’t go unheard.

You don’t have anyone on your team who reports to you. You can’t hire nor fire anyone. Engineers and designers are more capable than you when it comes to designing elegant solutions to hard problems. Where do you as a PM come in?

LESSONS LEARNED AT TYPEFORM

Imagine you’re a Product Manager at a tech company. In your role, you don’t have any direct authority over most of what makes a product successful.

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Your responsibility is to make sure that your team ships value to your customers. Continuously, and not just ‘something valuable’ or ‘more features’ — you should always be solving the most valuable customer problems.

How do you live up to your responsibility without any formal authority?

The answer is simple: you build relationships with the people on your team. You learn when to rely on people’s opinions, and when to double-check. You work hard so people know they can trust you to do a good job. In short, you embrace your lack of authority and lead your team to take the right product decisions.

The hard part is how to build these relationships with engineers and designers. You need to build up trust with your team — both in yourself as a leader and in your product vision.

In this post, you will learn how to work better with UX designers. You will get 6 lessons which I learned working as a product manager at Typeform.

I’ll link to the follow-up post — how to work better with engineers — here as soon as I have it.

Learn to view designs as hypotheses.There is a common trap for product managers. We

rely on our personal opinion about designs. The truth is it rarely matters.

In most cases, you are not the target customer. It doesn’t matter if you think a button looks ugly, you don’t like a color, or if you assume a flow is easy enough to complete. What matters is testing your assumptions with real users. Treat your personal opinion as what it is — one biased data point among many others. Every design is a hypothesis:

• “We believe changing the ‘Submit’ button’s color will improve conversions.”

• “We believe a task can be completed faster if we change how a flow works.”

• “We believe adding step-by-step onboarding will bring new users to the magic moment of our product faster.”

If you frame design this way, you can test your assumptions. You can put a new design in front of new users and see if they do what you intended. You can analyze quantitative data and see if the latest design change delivered the improvements you were looking for.

Team up and work together.When you build products, you first decide what to build, and then actually ship it. At Typeform, we call the part where we figure out what to build the discovery phase.

Discovery is a great opportunity to work closely together with UX designers. Share some customer calls. Ask for what they think is most valuable to work on next. Define research goals together. Brainstorm ways to implement continuous discovery in your teams.

You will be more aligned, and you’ll have a 100% user-focused perspective to improve your decision making. Don’t misinterpret owning your roadmap as having to shut yourself off from your designers and feel like you’re responsible for coming up with new value opportunities on your own.

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Adapt your schedule.As a PM, you’re almost guaranteed to have a manager’s schedule — your days are full of meetings, catchups, and talking with people. You switch your attention from one thing to another every hour at least, and that’s normal for you.

Designers are different. Many of their tasks require intense focus, and it’s good to be mindful around disrupting their flow.

At the same time, make sure you make yourself available. Yes, you’re busy and you have a thousand things on your plate. But if you want to build up trust and a good relationship, you need to work together.

Make time to work together on user research. Know what kind of concerns your designers have about your current product. This will make sure both of you are aligned, and you don’t get distracted by the usual ‘urgent’ stakeholder requests at the expense of what’s truly important — listening to your customers, and building great experiences for them.

Care about details.Supposedly trivial things can have a large impact — in good and bad ways. Let me give you a real-life example.

Once we moved a ‘Help’ button from a visible part of an application into a dropdown menu. Sounds easy, right? The functionality stays the same, it’s ‘just a small UI tweak’.

After this change, every time a user didn’t know how to perform an action, she faced a barrier where before there was none: there was no ‘Help’ or ‘Mayday’ button anywhere anymore. She didn’t know it was in the dropdown menu. She thought “I’m too stupid for this” and abandoned the flow. It’s what UX designers call a ‘cognitive leak’. And it’s how ‘just a small UI tweak’ impacted our metrics in ways we didn’t expect.

What we learned from this: learn to notice and care about details, and trust your designers’ intuition.

Learn to listen.UX designers speak a different language than product managers. Many times, their feedback is going to sound like this:

• “This will confuse our users.”

• “We can’t not have onboarding for this feature.”

• “We can’t do this. It’s not consistent with our design system.”

Often, product managers react in a predictable way. We don’t really take these concerns seriously. We think to ourselves:

• “Just because our users are confused doesn’t mean they will stop paying.”

• “I know, I know, it’s not great, but we have a deadline to make. Let’s just move on.”

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• “What the hell is this design system good for, anyway?!”

And we discard the feedback without really understanding why it matters. That’s a mistake. We’re probably right in thinking that just because our users are confused once, they won’t stop paying us. What we don’t see is that with this approach, in the long run, we’ll end up with a product nobody wants to use because of its sh*tty experience. User experience matters.

Make the extra effort to understand what designers mean when they worry about an experience, and only then take an informed decision considering the larger context and trade-offs you face.

Adapt your language.Product managers love data. We talk about conversion funnels and leading metrics. We look at KPI dashboards and A/B test the sh*t out of our releases. That’s a trait we share with most engineers, but designers are different.

Designers often don’t care as much about numbers. They care about real people. You have to replace cold data with customer empathy. Julie Zhuo wrote some cool ‘translations’ of how we as PMs typically think about user problems, and how you can phrase it in a customer-facing way:

• Optimize the conversion rate on the sign-up flow. Make it easier for users to sign up.

• Can we increase the click-through rate on this button? How can we make sure users know about this sweet new feature and that it’s easy to use?

• We need to not tank metrics with this change. We need to make sure this change doesn’t make it harder for users to do the things they want to do.

• Let’s pump up the viral coefficient. Let’s encourage users who like and enjoy this feature to share it with their friends.

Also be mindful when you use the term ‘MVP’. Most people — and that includes ourselves as product

managers—have a different understanding of what a minimum viable product actually is. Use a word which is less ambiguous. I can recommend Spotify’s earliest testable/usable/lovable approach.

I hope you find value from the lessons I learned:

• Learn to view designs as hypotheses.

• Team up and work together.

• Adapt your schedule.

• Care about details.

• Learn to listen.

• Adapt your language.

I mentioned Julie Zhuo’s article above — How to Work with Designers — and highly recommend you to read it in case you want to know more about the topic. Her — partly overlapping — suggestions are:

• To speak the language of designers, stop talking about metrics and start talking about users.

• Designers have different strengths. These strengths should be applied to the right problems.

• The more senior the designer, the more abstract the problem they should be solving.

• The more time a designer spends with other designers, the better the work (and the designer).

• A lot of what designers value and strive for in their work is hard to measure.

• The most direct path to a designer’s heart is to care about the details.

Sebastien PhlixProduct Manager at Typeform.comAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

PRODUCT MANAGER

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WHAT MAKES A GREATPRODUCT MARKETING MANAGER?

PMM is a face for a product line. He/ She provides support for program strategy, ongoing-sales support for a product line. PMM is responsible

for bringing the product to market and driving adoption of it.

ROLE OVERVIEW:

As the saying goes ‘Product Manager (PM)’ listens to the market and ‘Product Marketing Manager (PMM)’ talks to the market. PMM is an outbound role…it’s a highly externally focused job.

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Desired Skills for a Product Marketing Manager:Top/ Essential skills of the Awesome Product Marketing Manager –

• Strong communication skills are a must

• A great storyteller with a vision

• Creativity and expression – Trying new stuff

• Technical skills along with Business Basics – PMM needs to understand the technical elements of a product in order to communicate how and what benefits they bring to the customer

• Good Writing ability – Great products with great features are awesome, provided customer understands them

• Leadership and Teamwork

• Problem Solving ability – empathize customer’s situation, understand customer’s needs and relate these needs with product capabilities

Key Deliverables of a Product Marketing Manager:Few example deliverables of PMM are shared here.

• Personas and Marketing Message – Define Buyer and User personas and determine marketing message. Focus on customer’s needs and not what you’re selling/product capabilities

• Define customer acquisition and customer retention strategy

• Collaterals – Standard presentation, CxO presentation, Detailed presentations, Info graphs

• Product Launch Plan – Create/ Maintain a product launch for new products/ new major releases

• Market Research / Competitive Analysis – Industry research

• Sales Enablement – Enable sales/ presales, make them comfortable selling your products

• Sales Tools – Align sales tools to the standard/ typical buying process.

• Sales Info sheet/ product datasheet – Highlight the product features/ benefits/ competition/ USPs

• VBA/ ROI – Value Based Argumentation/ Return On Investment quantifies the

benefit to a customer resulting from product/ service investment

• Win/ Loss Analysis – helps to win more business by studying past sales deals.

• Case Study – highlighting customer and partner success with our products and solutions

• Demo – Story building, videos, story document

• Sales Battle card – Understand and highlight target customer, market, features, benefits, success stories

• Pricing Models – Explain the pricing model; example: Revenue sharing, Transaction based, Register user based

• Budgetary pricing package – Approx. non-binding customer pricing based on small/ medium/ large enterprise opportunities

• Reference customer details – Identify product references for industry and customer referrals

• Blogs – Deliver thought-reading contents via blogs/ events/ eBooks

• Feedback for roadmap – Although primary focus of PMM is to talk to the market, it’s important to communicate back the feedback from customers/ field to strengthen the roadmap

Finally, keep measuring and fine-tuning the effectiveness of product marketing programs.

Concluding remarksA successful Product Marketing Manager is one who enables sales/ pre-sales team to comfortably support customer opportunities. The success of PMM is not just about his/ her skills/ competencies rather a PMM is successful when sales/ pre-sales team is armed/ equipped/ enabled with the knowledge and tools they need to be successful to carry out sales independently.

PRODUCT MARKETING

Dinesh SharmaProduct Line Manager at Redknee Inc.Author | Prodmagazine.com

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Muralidhar is a technology leader, start-up mentor, and a yoga instructor. He led engineering and product management portfolio of multi-million dollar SaaS/Analytics businesses at Cisco Systems. He is passionate about product innovation and applications of artificial intelligence in solving real-world problems.

MURALIDHAR SOMISETTYCo-founder & CTO | WoisesEditor | Prodmagazine.com

Shelby Stewart is a Product Owner at an Ed-Tech company in Silicon Valley. She’s passionate about her users and helping them achieve their educational dreams.

SHELBY STEWARTPassionate about ProductAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

Neil has a background as an implementation analyst. He admires the role of a product manager and the responsibilities it entails and hopes to become one in the future.

NEIL ARCHIBALDImplementation AnalystAuthor | Prodmagazine.com

Dinesh B Sharma, is a Product Line Manager at Redknee Inc., a leading global provider of innovative communication software products, solutions and services. He has got overall 17 years of experience.

DINESH B. SHARMAProduct Line Manager at Redknee Inc.Author | Prodmagazine.com

DAVID FRADINPrincipal | www.spicecatalyst.com

Editor | Prodmagazine.com

David was classically trained as an HP Product Manager and was then recruited by Apple. He has over 47 years of product management, product marketing management and senior management experience.

MAARTEN DALMIJNProduct Owner

Author | Prodmagazine.com

Maarten Dalmijn is a product manager specialized in agile software development. He has 8 years of experience building innovative software products.

SEBASTIEN PHLIXProduct Manager at Typeform.com

Author | Prodmagazine.com

He is a member of Typeform’s Product team and plays a role of Product Owner in defining the product vision and strategy for one of five core development teams. He is an Agile Coach and helps the team to scale an Agile approach

within the organization.

Editorial Team

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