Roaring sounds of silence

During every interview for a Product Manager’s position, there is always a mandatory question about the correct prioritisation of requirements coming from stakeholders. If I am honest, after spending five years in such a position, I still don’t know which answer is the correct one. Sometimes you need to have a very strong gut feeling and sometimes everything depends on the ROI.

Working in the iGaming industry and deciding which feature should be developed first for the CRM tool is difficult. Imagine you have two high-level clients, who want very different features at the same time on one end, and a small team of developers on the other. And I’m not even talking about the internal stakeholders…

As a Product Manager, and a person who is constantly in contact with the customers, you have a big impact on that decision. And because we are talking about working in an Agile environment, the team also has a Team Leader and a Product Owner, who is the main person to make the decision about the feature’s development. I will explain what Agile is, so it will be easier to understand the concept behind software development. Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster. The four pillars of Agile that an Agile environment must support are:

-Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

-Working software over comprehensive documentation

-Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

-Responding to change over following a plan

So basically what we have here is a time boxed approach for building and delivering products with the help of the development team. Before each iteration you gather your team and try to decide with which feature to go first. Each company has different roles and positions in the team, and everyone can have different responsibilities from company to company. Being a Product Manager means first of all that you also do lots of customer support (let’s forget for a moment the whole bunch of other things you as a Product Manager must do). Let’s go through the soft skills that may help you a lot in this position.

I would start with problem solving and emotional intelligence. Working with people is hard, you deal with so many diverse cultures and nationalities, but you always have to keep your cool and help your customer achieve their goals. As a PM you have to identify and solve the problem as soon as possible. And what if you have several issues to solve at the same time? What would you do then? Would you hire a team of Product Managers to help you out? Or would you do everything by yourself? The answer depends on the amount of clients you’re dealing with on a daily basis and the business requirements you are receiving.

As the Product Manager, you are a Keeper of All Product Knowledge. You alone should be the person who knows all the answers to the questions about your product. It’s your job to keep team members and stakeholders up to date on what’s happening with your product. It’s also your job to provide clear, comprehensive guidance to your design, engineering and development teams. Poorly presented information can result in misaligned expectations and missed deadlines. And when deadlines are missed, everyone is unhappy.

With so many responsibilities, your day will be filled with all types of communication: meeting notes, Slack conversations, Skype, Zoom or Meet calls, wikis, presentations, training materials, your Ultimate Guide - the product requirements document and, let’s not forget, meeting for the sake of a meeting 1-2 hours spent on what could have been just an email, quick chat over the water cooler or during a coffee break.

Another very important skill that any Product Manager should have is listening - and when I say listening I truly mean it. Since you want your product to be successful, you absolutely must listen to your customers’ feedback good or bad, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, it’s your customer who will use your tool, not you or your developers. If you can’t connect on a personal level with your customer, they may end up leaving your company and your product. The competition is super saturated these days.

And here’s the real problem: there are two groups of customers - active and silent. Listen more to the second one, as they are the majority and it’s them who decide the success of your product. While working and receiving feedback mainly from the active customers, it’s quite easy to forget there are more customers in the second segment and when they remain silent, much like players, they can easily churn, and you won’t even notice it until they have already signed with your competitor.

So summarising all the above we can say that being a Product Manager is cool and hard at the same time. You will have a lot on your plate every day. You are responsible for the strategy, roadmap and feature definition for the product. It is a big responsibility that requires facilitating and collaborating with many different teams - both internal and external - without the formal authority to manage those teams. It requires a unique mix of humility and strength. Yes, you will be responsible for many failures of your product, but you will learn so much more and will definitely enjoy the ride. The best part is that you have a great opportunity to create new features and have a huge impact on the customer’s user experience.