Author: Jon Sadow / Source: VentureBeat
Over the last 10 years, I’ve moved from sales and business development roles to a product manager position at Google. Most recently, I helped co-found Scoop, where I serve as the Chief Product Officer and help guide our Design, Analytics, and Product Management teams toward creating a great product.
I think my experience seeing product management from the outside in, as well as being in charge of product, has lent me valuable insights into how a good product manager operates.If my experience has taught me anything, it’s that startups don’t need a product manager striving to be a visionary. Instead, they get maximum benefit from someone who focuses less on the glamour and invention and more on empowering teams to build the most impactful product possible.
Be a street sweeper
At its core, being a great product manager is about clearing the path for everyone else on the team to set them up for success. During my career, I’ve learned firsthand just how mundane many of those tasks really are.
On my team at Google, we scaled and rolled out our mobile product in more than 10 countries over 18 months. On its face, that sounds exciting: international travel, different languages, unique market dynamics, and more. In truth, my role as product manager required me to focus on tactical considerations, such as international finance law, translation services, and minute details, like how to account for languages whose characters were too large for a specific screen size. To successfully enter new markets, the team and I dealt not with traversing new geographies, but instead with crossing the rough terrain of various government entities and their approval processes. In doing so, it became clear to me just how vital those seemingly mundane activities really are to moving a project to its finish line. Without those conversations about font size or finance law, we never would have gotten the product off the ground.
When managers spend their time dreaming up the next great global product, they often aren’t addressing the more mundane – but critical – tasks in front of the team. Their refusal to sweep the street – or worse, their belief that they’re above that – can lead to ineffective processes that result in delayed product development and deployment.
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
I learned the importance of prioritizing at another stop on my career. My team was working on a product feature, and we knew there were a number of different capabilities with which we could experiment. Initially, we adopted a visionary approach: We wanted to include complicated, sophisticated capabilities in pursuit of what we felt would be a complete feature. Our initial goal was to bring a full vision to life by including all the bells and whistles we felt we had at our…
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