Fill the gap, Product Manager
Most companies don’t have dedicated product areas. Due to digital transformation, they still decide to hire their first Product Managers. And it is possible to thrive in this environment
Hello, I’m Tiago Ferreira, Sr. Product Manager in Brazil with +6 years of experience crafting products. With The Next Movement, I want to share part of my product management experience with the whole world, but also talk about career more broadly, technology, good books, and - why not? - philosophy, music, culture, gossip, just like an open diary. If you enjoy reading my article, subscribe and share it with your friends 🤓
Imagine that you were hired to a Product management job where:
You don’t have a development team yet;
The product isn’t tagged to collect metrics;
You have to report to a sales or marketing teams (which means that you don’t have a former product leader).
Seems like a build trap, huh?
Unfortunately, this scenario is more common than you think. Besides all the negative aspects, I’m optimistic that the PM could thrive in this scenario.
Read the context
That’s the most important soft skill for PMs. During the hiring process, some questions could help identify the scenario, but try to forget that and restart: you are there for a reason. Assume that if you accept the position, you are good enough to make a difference.
To read the context, you can start drawing a map: which are the most strategic areas? Who are the key stakeholders that you have to align? How things are done in the company?
Consider this a discovery moment. If the strategy is not documented, talk to your boss to understand that. In my first years as a PM, I was hired to lead a content squad. What was most intriguing to me at that moment was the “lack of strategy”. I asked several times on my 1:1s, and I remember my senior leader advising me that I needed to interpret the scenario. Only after I understood that my squad was kind of a bridge to connect marketing and e-commerce teams did I pull up my team and accelerate the delivery.
You don’t have to apply all PM skills in your company
When you start working as a Product Manager, it’s tempting to put into practice all the frameworks you learned. Well, if you work in an environment where sales and marketing teams see technology as a cost, citing dailies and sprints won’t help you. They’re more interested in your backlog and deadlines.
In this case, it’s more important to identify and maintain close relationships with key stakeholders from those areas. First, try to understand how they influence results at the company and, little by little, contribute to the product approach: more KPIs and results than discovery and sprints. Leaders and ICs understand metrics and the importance of talking to customers, but they want to know how your team delivers and needs to report to their leadership about deadlines and results.
Staying close to the business is more important than delivering all user stories on a sprint cycle. If you have to skip some dailies, don’t feel bad. It’s more important to stay aligned with different areas, which could cost you more dedicated time than you imagine.
Make some noise
You understand how you can best contribute to the company and your team. Even if your product doesn’t collect all the metrics you wanted, your company should have defined progress: the product launching, sales increasing, downsizing the cost of the leads…
Once you correlate how your product contributes to those challenges, don’t forget to celebrate!
In some contexts, the product manager is responsible for spotlighting the technology team, and I strongly recommend making some noise at that moment. Give praise to the development team, and make presentations showing how the new feature or bug fix increased the metrics that the company values. Everybody at the company needs to know how important product and technology are to drive results to the business.
Especially in companies where you don’t have the product area well-structured, the product manager needs to stay connected with key stakeholders and fill all the gaps between technology and, let’s say, more traditional departments.
In recent years, we saw Product-Led Growth (PLG) evolving, but in Brazil, it seems like a distant reality, considering that many not technologically-first companies started to hire their first product managers just a few years ago.
This is a good movement, and I’m optimistic enough to believe that PLG will increase and we’ll see more effective digital transformation in big companies.
But, until then, consider your position in this context more like filling the gaps. You need to have patience, to dig deeper to understand the real problem and connect sales and marketing to technology. If you thrive in this environment, you could be rewarded - who knows this could be a good start to grow the product area.