Defining Success as Product Manager
Defining the success of either a feature or product is one of the key responsibilities of product managers. Setting clear objectives for your team helps everybody to work towards the same goal, build motivation and communication tone around the team and eventually led them to have successful releases.
Let me briefly explain how I handled as PM drawing from my past experiences.
Starting from the bigger picture
One of the most overrated PM definitions is ‘being the CEO of the product’. Well, even though it can be sometimes true in execution phases, it doesn’t mean anything for the strategy phase. You work for a company and its products. Eventually, as a PM, it’s your responsibility to you and your team should move according to the company’s goals. So, your success definition performs as fuel where your company desires to go. Let’s start the find out the highest level goals with these questions:
- What is the company’s mission?
- What problems company wants to solve with that product for their users?
- What should be the product’s goal and its metrics that serve the company’s mission?
Once you have an understanding of the what company wants with the product, now it’s a good time to focus on desired key actions of the product.
Focusing on the key actions
Whether it’s a bug fix, sprint or MVP launch; every level of development has respective KPIs that focus on fix on real customer problems. These KPIs serve as spotlights for product managers while dealing with many different challenges from finding out the feature set that needs to build to what needs to be done. Moreover, KPIs sparkle motivation for every team member since they would have a clear purpose about what are they building and why.
Here are tips and tricks to find out the KPIs and metrics:
- Analyze & Validate by being data-informed
Observe changes, drop and growth trends and pitfalls in the data set.
- Take into qualitative insights account
Do the product discovery research, talk with customer faced departments to gain confidence in your goal
Be prepared to adapt the results of an MVP launch to initial KPIs
Making sure the release is successful
Let’s fast forward. You have created an environment where every team member can work efficiently and you made it to the launch day. Time to send your Falcon 9 to the sky.
Launch days are exciting. You can't wait to see the results of what you have developed. All this excitement usually comes with chaos and stress. But hey, a bit of stress is perfectly normal if you are prepared for the launch itself as well. That’s the exact reason why product managers should create a strong release plan.
- Align stakeholders with what to expect
Involving stakeholders early as possible and updating them about each step, including the release part helps PM to manage others' expectations about the product and its success definition.
- Get your tracking instruments ready
You can’t track your success if there is nowhere to look, so coordinate with your developers, data teams and marketing teams to create a functional tracking setup.
Get your benchmarks ready to compare with the new data you will collect. One tip here, determining the frequency of data collection is key. Some metrics you want to track every day for the first week of launch, but after that when you make sure everything works well, you may reduce the frequency to let’s say monthly basis.
User Acceptance Test(UAT) is the latest step of testing in which actual end-users test your product before launch. Product managers need to create documentation about how and what to test, what is the pass/fail criteria and how testers can report it. Company employees from different teams or an actual customer subset can be used to run the test.
Turn the feature on and be ready the celebrate your team’s hard work! Also, be cautious about unexpected results. One approach it can be used to solve the unexpected results is understanding what’s the problem, why it’s happening and how to fix it/which resources can fix it. You may need to pause your production feature if the problem affects many people and will take some time to fix.
Digital products are nothing different than live creatures. They are looking for success in their life cycles besides many similar aspects. Product managers should understand the success of a product is a constant subject that needs to be dealt with during the whole process. Understanding why the product exists good way to start but it would be missing if the delivery of the product doesn’t take into consideration during the success practices.