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Navigating the Challenges of Learning Product Management

Welcome to our Product Newsletter, a biweekly email highlighting top discussions, and learning resources for product managers.

What We Will Cover In This Edition:-

Top Discussions: 

1) Is learning product management challenging or hard to master?

2) How can I practice my product management skills?

3) How can specific product decisions be documented?

Top Learning Resources:

1. MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager

2. What should a head of product do?

3. What Product Managers get wrong about user stories

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Top Discussions

Question 1Is learning product management challenging or hard to master?

Being a great PM is really difficult because it involves talents in a variety of areas to succeed, yet sometimes I think it’s just a job with low hurdles to entry, where actually anyone could get started: strategy, research, data, tech, collaboration & communication, decision making, execution, product sense.

Although getting started as a PM in my fifth year was actually quite simple, I was unable to advance to seniority. Additionally, the more I read on Twitter about excellent PMs, the less I feel like I belong there.

– Vlad Podpoly

Discussion

A] After a week of employment, I believe you will notice the fakers. However, firms are terrible at finding qualified PMs, or perhaps there is such a huge demand that they will hire anyone who is brave enough to pursue the field at all.

– Mario Romero

B] I ’ve tried to fake it till I made it a lot of times. If you have drive, it works. However, if you don’t succeed, the corporation is taking a big risk. However, I also think that this behavior will continue forever. Because businesses frequently claim that they would prefer to hire someone who is eager to learn and develop than someone who has expertise but lacks motivation, but in practice they rarely let such kinds of people in. It is challenging to assess a candidate’s motivation or ability to quickly catch up.

Fun fact: When I was 19 years old, I was hired as an IT technician right out of college. I had my own office, a company car, and a respectable salary for the time. Later, when I had no verified experience, I questioned the IT Manager about why he had bet on me. Because I saw on your resume that you are not afraid of hard work, he said. However, my resume basically consisted of me working my ass off every summer since I was 14 in order to have my own money and move out to my own apartment as soon as possible.

– Ahmad Bashir

C] I oversee a group of six PMs, and I firmly instruct them “Your explicit value is in identifying user pain from as many sources as you can, synthesizing that pain into data, evaluating that data, and then advising the business on what to do to alleviate it.

I won’t tell you what to do or what the plan is; instead, I need you to advise the company and me on the best course of action. Project management, sprint planning, estimating, and any other low level BAU tasks should be delegated as much as possible to your tech leads and engineering managers.”

Project management is open to any chump. My definition of a proper, actual PM is someone who can generate well-thought-out, well-validated ideas, hypotheses, or “bets” in (often) uncertain, contradictory, complex, multi-stakeholder, hard-to-get-good-data spaces, dissect them to pieces before devoting any time to them, and be 3-6 months ahead of the developers in terms of where we need to go next.

–  Dhiraj Mehta

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Question 2) How can I practice my product management skills?

I recently completed a product management course while unemployed. What is the greatest approach for me to practice my abilities and interviews while I’m seeking for jobs?

– Pouya Taaghol

Discussion

A] Use Jira or a Trello board to organize your life, practice wire framing, design sketching, read company news or yearly reports, perform statistical research, ask people what they do and what difficulties they have with X, and practice conducting interviews. Good luck!

– Natasha Martin

B] Create an app using a NoCode platform, such as Flutterflow. Although there are some suggestions in the comments to create wireframes, the NoCode platforms allow you to create a functioning app right out of the box. Although you’ll ultimately run into restrictions, I know some PMs who have developed entire companies on these kinds of networks.

I don’t work for Flutterflow; there are other platforms. It’s merely the newest shiny thing I’ve come across.

– Shiyao Liu

C] Consider a problem you’d like to fix in your life, at work, in your neighbourhood, or in your environment.

Get a pad and a pen, and sketch three solutions to the issue.

Ask yourself if each is desirable (would people pay for this problem to be solved by this solution? ), practicable (could it actually be built? ), and viable (once people are using it, will it scale). Verify this with ten other persons who have the same issue.

For each solution, devise a method to measure each of those three axes.

Choose the candidate with the best rating. Your MVP scope is that. Create it.

– Michael Yoffe

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Question 3) How can specific product decisions be documented?

If there is a common document type where you can keep track of your decisions regarding features over time, that would be interesting to know. I’m not talking about how you direct developers; rather, I’m referring to how you articulate to other parties why you made a decision (which is typically a combination of practicality, strategy, user information, analytics data, thought evolution, and other things).

In order to keep track of this thinking over time and recall what happened a few months later and where the thinking ended up, I just sort of made up the phrase “design rationale,” although it comes to me that it might be “named” something! I’d be interested in knowing how you handle situations like these in other countries.

– Natasha Martin

Discussion

A] We document the requirements for the functionality on Confluence and then add to it. We place a change log at the top and a decision matrix in a table with plenty of visibility if there is client feedback.

If there are numerous changes that must be made at once, a new project will use the previous version as a guide.

– Ana Rodriguez

B] I refer to it as a “decision doc,” and I only use it for significant issues. The decision doc is a tool to think clearly, focus discussion on sub-items, and monitor when each discussion is resolved. It is NOT a technique to retrospectively chronicle what transpired. Then it serves as future documentation. I make it clear to all of my PMs that I want to see them develop strong PRDs, go/no-gos, and decision documents. In my opinion, they are all essential PM abilities.

– Carlos Dubois

C] I’ve spoken with several teams using wikis or some decision document repository and found some common themes with Google Drives filled with linked documents or collections of confluence pages to be a nightmare if you’re looking to pull on a decision thread. If you didn’t write those documents (and sometimes even if you did), prepare to see where the rabbit hole goes. Plus, they often lack a clear persistent connection to the list of information you outlined above and tend to become stale immediately after publishing.

I’m working on building a visual documentation & decision-making tool that connects the dots between product strategy & execution/experimentation (https://vistaly.com). We’re looking to provide a visual map for exploring product decisions and collaborating on new ones. Internally, we’ve been considering it as GitHub (version control) for Product.

Many people say “searching and finding the information” is essential (and they are correct). Still, I believe the more significant challenge is connecting the dots to all the other moving pieces without reading and internalizing the company’s intranet.

– Marco Silva

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Top Learning Resources

MVPM: Minimum Viable Product Manager

MVPM in no way implies that you need to achieve mastery of its skills to be effective, which is both impractical and counterproductive for someone starting out. Instead, view it as a syllabus of sorts for the course in product management that doesn’t exist.

As the head of product, you play a key part in developing the people on your team, creating an environment that helps them succeed, and improving the effectiveness of the product management function in the enterprise.

What Product Managers get wrong about user stories

While product managers focus on the customer problem and solution (the what, the why, and what the customer experience should be), the core focus of engineering is the technical implementation details. These are two completely different perspectives. Bridging this gap is essential but it can be a messy process and the how is not often talked about.

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