Product management is all about taming fires and winning friends

Photo credit: Marko Horvat.

As a product manager in a high-growth environment, I have come to accept that at any given time, something is on fire. Or, at the very least, smoldering.

My company, Raygun, had just five people in the team five years ago. Now, we’re building products for businesses like Nordstrom. But with this growth comes many learning opportunities.

During our highest growth periods, I’ve found that the key to effective product management lies in two main areas: taming fires and winning friends.

To survive in a high-growth environment, you must learn to prioritize and then get your team on board, so the whole team becomes focused on the strategic direction of the company. In this post, I’ll share how I’ve learned to tame fires and win friends along the way.

How to tame fires with extreme focus

Building products are chaotic. If you have too many fires and not enough buckets, you’ll spend too much time firefighting and not enough time building. This leads product quality to suffer and product direction to be determined by problems.

In my experience, too many fires come from:

• Not enough buckets
• Not knowing what you don’t know (you’re not technical enough)
• The idea that all problems are highly urgent and important
• Not enough/too many data points and not enough time to interpret them
• Trying to be everything for everyone and solving everything

Early on, I recognized that there was a need to put some fire-taming strategies in place. So, here’s what I do on a day-to-day basis to ensure things don’t get the better of me.

Find a prioritization framework that works for you

This article by Daniel Zacarias summarizes 20 prioritization techniques and discusses that prioritization is the result of not having enough resources—a very typical scenario in product management. Each prioritization framework caters to different needs, but whichever one you choose will help you organize, prioritize, and establish relationships between company and customer.

In my team, we lean heavily on our tools like Slack, JIRA, and our own tool, which helps me see performance optimization tasks by priority.

Get to know your co-workers and their strengths

You’re responsible for outcomes, not inputs. To do that, you must be able to rally your team around your ideas. In a high-growth environment, you simply can’t afford internal team politics. Knowing the right person for the job can cut out a lot of time, instead of a generic Slack message saying, “Can anyone help me with…?”

How to win friends while taming fires

Taming fires and winning friends are skills