Three Newbie PM Mistakes

I transitioned from engineering to product management and have been in the continuos cycles of making new mistakes and learning from them. Here are a few of them:

Confusing solution design with product design - This particularly applies to the newbie platform product managers. The requirements rely heavily on what the solution would look like. Dont get me wrong - a product manager should definitely be involved and invested in the solution design, but speaking the requirements or use-case language vs. api or services language can be a learning curve for a newbie (especially someone who transitioned from engineering).

Not having your own roadmap items - Especially in large and growing organizations, resources can easily be sucked up in meeting the needs of the stakeholders and upgrading the infrastructure. A newbie PM would have the added pressure of pleasing the stakeholders and build relationships with the engineering. This could lead to not having your own vision of the product or the platform you are accountable for. In fact, it may get to a point where one feels identity crises.

Relying on engineers to build the tracking - Another newbie mistake is to think that the 'requirements' for building a feature doesnt include the call out for data logging and the PM ends up relying on the engineers to log the right data that could eventually be used for tracking product performance. No matter how small a feature is - one needs to think through the tracking upfront!

What do the Product Managers Do?

Product manager role has one of the broadest job descriptions and it is one of the hardest roles to explain. Here's my take:

Product managers are responsible for identifying and solving the customer problems, measuring the effectiveness of the solutions and iterating. They are engaged in all activities involved in these cycles - from talking to customers to forming solutions, from creating requirements to testing the solutions and from launching the solutions to taking feedback from the customers. Obviously, in most large organizations, one person doesnt get to do all these tasks, but in one way or the other a PM (or an ideal PM) should be involved throughout the lifecycle of a product, which is nothing but a solution to a customer problem.

One would argue that not all the product managers work on customer facing things. Yes, that is true. In fact, most product managers would seem to be not working directly with customer facing things, but if we broaden the definition of a customer and include internal stakeholders, then most product managers should be working on solving a customer problem. Although writing requirement documents or user stories is probably the most important task of a product manager, it is far from being the only task.