Nacho Bassino
Photo credit: Rawpixel
There are a lot of things you need to do to be a successful product manager. And when you are just starting out or trying to improve your current performance, there usually isn’t much clarity on what areas to focus on. There is also a tendency to shelter in the activities that are within your comfort zone.
As a product leader, I’d like to share some goals product managers should focus on to help them progress faster.
The goals
Data-drivenness
I found this one very hard to measure. Ideally, we want every decision to be data-based, but we can’t measure how we make every single decision.
Let’s say we want to measure the performance of an ecommerce site’s traffic sources. Of course, we will look at the conversion rate per source. But what about the different steps of micro-conversion among sources, the most visited products, or cross-source attribution?
So, my proxy is to set learning goals and to prepare a deep report using current data.
The report should have the following components:
- Learning goal and set of questions your team wants to answer
- Analyzed data
- Answers to questions
- Data you plan to track
- Surprises (unexpected findings)
- Conclusion and next steps (e.g “Put X in the backlog,” or “Investigate Y further”)
Produce a monthly or biweekly report and review it through straightforward one-on-one conversations. You can add questions to improve your team members’ reasoning, but the report is mostly a tool for them to help them drive better data-driven conclusions.
User centricity
Like with data-drivenness, it’s also very difficult to measure whether the thought process behind every decision is actually user-centric.
Again, I use a basic proxy: number of customer interactions. We also use the same method: set a learning goal and set up a customer interaction that will help you know what the customer thinks.
- You want to see how easy your checkout is? Set a usability test.
- You want to investigate what drives conversion? Do a round of customer development interviews.
- You want to check if a proposed solution resonates with the user? Do a solution-focused interview.
