Best practices and tips for being a great product manager

EI is also a crucial part of knowing how to manage engineers, and it goes beyond staying level-headed under pressure or diffusing tense situations. Each team member’s mental well-being affects their efficiency and productivity as much as their physical health, so it should be considered when making managerial decisions. If a team member seems constantly overwhelmed, you may need to allocate more resources or support to help them. Understanding what motivates each individual is another key part of effective management.

Step 6: Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Best practices and tips for being a great product manager

This is essential for ensuring that all team members are working on the most important tasks at any given point in time. You can use Google software quality assurance (QA) analyst Analytics or any other tool that helps to review and track the user data. As a product person, I think it’s important to make sure that you’re able to take a stand and are able to identify where you should push back.

  • Developing a deep understanding of your product will not only help you in team discussions but in interactions with customers and potential customers, too.
  • Recruiting and hiring the best costs more, but saves loads of time and money on training — and also protects you from failure in the future.
  • The role requires an individual who can look at products from a customer’s point of view, understand what customers expect, and guide development.
  • Surprise and delight them with relevant offers and suggestions.
  • People often create products but fail to properly market them and evaluate their success.
  • Agile methodologies are used to break down work into smaller, iterative sprints, allowing for course correction based on market conditions.

What separates top product managers from the rest of the pack

  • Once your goals are set, break them down into smaller milestones—specific achievements that mark progress along the way.
  • To make sure teams share the data, give them the right communication tools.
  • A well-articulated product vision keeps teams focused and ensures that every decision contributes to the long-term goal.
  • Bringing a product to life—from idea to launch and beyond—is no small task.
  • In contrast, Product Owners (PO) are tactical executors, playing a critical role in product development.
  • Emotionally intelligent people tend to be more effective leaders.

But here’s one from me that I think is possibly the most dangerous you can receive at the dawn of your career. “When given without context and guidance, this tends to inspire people who just want control and don’t like collaborating. When striving to improve, it’s always smart to seek advice from those you Product Manager job trust and respect.

Keep your roadmap flexible

  • For example, your goals might include increasing user adoption, launching new features, or hitting revenue targets.
  • Product managers may create a process to receive ideas from customers and company teams.
  • Have robust systems to monitor and respond to messages at top speed.
  • This means understanding new trends, features they’re releasing, and shifts in user needs.
  • Pay attention to early user feedback and monitor customer support channels to spot issues quickly.

Clear communication gives you insight into each member’s mental state and conveys project updates in real-time. Read on for engineering manager tips that can help you develop into an effective engineering leader. If you’ve recently accepted or are interested in pursuing an engineering management role, this article is a solid starting point with practical tips to help you grow. If you have direct reports, every one-to-one meeting should try and incorporate discussions of the employee’s career growth and future. While it’s easy to get caught up in the crisis-of-the-moment or latest office drama, it’s important to make some time for these developmental matters. It conveys that you care about them as more than just a pawn in your empire and are actually interested in their own personal success.

Carve Out Time for Reflection

Best practices and tips for being a great product manager

Here’s how you can leverage Creately throughout your product management journey. Identifying unforeseen product outcomes is as important as validating intended behaviors for creating value. Top product managers proactively look for unexpected outcomes or feedback of the products they develop to better understand how they can meet their customers’ needs. We set out to understand the best practices of top-performing product management organizations, how top product managers operate day to day, and how they help companies grow. The series featured eight world-class product experts from leading organizations. Companies across industries increasingly view software not just as an enabler of business but also a source of distinction.