I am curious how our users and customers solve problems for my product area(s). Others seek me out as the person who is thinking about where we could go next. I use our constraints and insights to prioritize hard problems that our customers will value, solving in a way that works for our business. I work with peers and stakeholders to remove barriers to meaningful progress.
- I discuss with customers, regularly, their needs and desires to identify opportunities to improve our product
- I discuss with customer teams emerging trends and opportunities to improve my product area(s)
- I use research and data to inform my perspective of the impact of the opportunities we are considering
- I monitor key movements of competitors and broader industry trends to maintain our competitive advantages
- I influence how others think about the direction for my product area(s) to create interest that helps me refine the direction
- I collect a range of inputs and perspectives to inform the decisions I make in shaping opportunities
- I evaluate, clarify, and prioritize the opportunities that we are pursuing to create focus and progress for my product area(s)
- I align my product team and key stakeholders (cross-functional managers) to create support for our choices
- I define the opportunity we are pursuing and why we should do it now to ensure that all contributors can explain it themselves
- I collaborate with peers in discovering potential solutions, advocating for progress over perfection, to seek out the best possible solution within the constraints
- I partner with design in running experiments that test assumptions to increase our confidence that we are making good choices
- I contribute towards quality assurance, documentation, and escalate, if needed, for help to remove barriers towards progress
- I communicate progress, regularly, with R&D leadership and key stakeholders to maintain awareness of our efforts and coordinate related activities
- I partner with marketing teams to incorporate our work into the product messaging activities
- I partner with customer teams to learn how early adopters achieve desired outcomes
- I monitor the impact of our work across our customers and our business to learn about where we succeeded and struggled
- I communicate the impact and learning to build the credibility of our team
- I keep current with the concepts of my product area(s) to confidentially demonstrate the functionality and answer questions from customers and other teams
- I take accountability for the performance of my product area(s), owning the problems to learn how we can improve
- I seek out learning and inspiration to expand my awareness of different techniques
- I reflect, regularly, on my personal and professional development to contribute in a growing company
I break down silos to make meaningful, regular impact in my product area(s). I use a network to help me find emerging opportunities and spot risks that could impact our work. To bring everyone on the journey I tell stories that create a shared understanding of our customers and how our choices will help them. I build trust in what we do through influence and persuasion, nurturing the team’s reputation for making progress in the toughest of times. I am ready to lead a stream of work with little guidance, developing my strategic and commercial thinking muscles. I share my experiences and learning to help others build their product muscles.
- I nurture customer and industry relationships who have a track record of providing insights to help us focus on why certain behaviours occur
- I use structured feedback loops to obtain the insights needed to confirm and/or contradict our understanding of a problem space
- I watch operations and support work to find opportunities that improve our business efficiency / effectiveness
- I bring new competitor insights into the organisation to drive activities that maintain our sustainable competitive advantage
- I facilitate debate amongst key stakeholders and influencers on future opportunities to involve them in co-creating the direction for my product area(s)
- I coordinate product opportunities that extend beyond my area(s) to deliver larger impact to the product
- I develop a way forward for new or ambiguous situations that are directionally sensible with limited guidance to unlock progress that has been previously out of reach
- I prune, regularly, my product area(s) to ensure we can deliver a premium experience without overwhelming our users
- I use the hypothesis of our work to test our assumptions and work with my team to discover what is actually needed
- I collaborate with the team on risks and failure modes for our work to figure out what we can do to increase our chance of success
- I include a diverse set of perspectives within and beyond the team on potential solutions to sharpen the team’s thinking about what is essential
- I can spot when we are blocked or over-analysing to bring us back to small, incremental progress
- I celebrate wins and share learning throughout the development cycle to build up the team’s mana
- I influence go-to-market planning in choosing measurable acquisition and adoption journeys to increase the early satisfaction measures of my product area(s)
- I partner with sales and customer success for early adopters to validate if our assumptions about the choices we made are correct
- I partner with marketing and customer success to develop customer case studies that support growth for my product area(s)
- I seek feedback to challenge my own thinking
- I am actively involved in the retrospective process, and I am comfortable challenging and coaching my peers
- I mentor another person on their product thinking to help them to round out their skill set
- I share my on-the-job learning and experiences with others so they can be more effective in their roles
I develop a deep understanding of directional product opportunities. I turn a highly ambiguous or uncertain opportunity space into potentially viable opportunities that inform our strategic choices. I lead initial approaches with design and engineering partners to validate and refine our hypothesis. I lead the team through the fog to ship the first releases. I work closely with marketing, sales, customers, and industry influencers to earn credibility in the eyes of the market. My influence can be seen by customers and across the company. The work I do contributes to lasting change in the product value proposition.
I develop a deep understanding of the opportunities and barriers to our strategic product direction.
- I research strategic product opportunities to understand their viability.
- I validate opportunities with customers and partners to build confidence in the opportunities we are considering.
- I look for unique opportunities to differentiate our approach or accelerate our progress.
- I educate people on opportunities to generate urgency for the most impactful opportunities.
- I align senior leaders on the opportunity to influence investment and organisational change in pursuit of the opportunity.
- I share progress and impact stories to reinforce the product direction and motivate teams.
- I regularly inspect progress to challenge our assumptions and then decide to persist or pivot based on what we learn.
- I partner with marketing and sales in reshaping product messaging and experimenting in go-to-market to build a credible story.
- I build relationships with influencers to promote our point of view.
- I use my on-the-job learning and experiences to evangelise best practices on product thinking.
- I support Product Directors in coaching people on product practices.
I am curious about how product teams identify opportunities, match problems with solutions, and earn healthy adoption. Others seek me out as the person who can help improve communication, feedback loops, and data sets that lead to improving our decision-making confidence. I work with product teams to prioritize problems that will improve our understanding of customers which in turn increases our chance of delivering impactful results.
- I learn from product teams about their ways of working to identify opportunities to share and improve product practices
- I learn from customer teams how they listen for and provide feedback to product teams to identify opportunities to streamline communication
- I consult with product teams who have faced similar challenges to understand what is working for them and how we might apply the learning in our context
- I facilitate continuing education among product managers to experiment with ways of working
I design and implement systems that enable product teams to improve collaboration with teams across the business
- I facilitate portfolio planning activities to help teams align with other teams and communicate their plans and progress
- I ensure product plans and updates are accessible and useful for customer teams to support them in managing customer expectations
- I capture sensible defaults and working practices based on the experiences of our product teams to enable new teams to have a good starting point
- I partner with UX and operations teams for reliable, understandable metrics to support decision making and track impact
- I partner with UX and customer teams on streamlining feedback loops to enable product teams to incorporate feedback in decision making
- I keep current with product management concepts and practices to confidently demonstrate the functionality and answer questions from product teams and stakeholders
- I take accountability for the performance of product practices, taking owning of structural problems to learn how we can improve
- I seek out learning and inspiration to expand my awareness of different techniques
- I reflect, regularly, on my personal and professional development to contribute to a growing company
I own the storyboard for the product, from where we are today to the choices on where we invest next. I spend time exploring where we could go next, while looking back to ensure that most of our customers are able to take advantage of our work. I watch for changes in market needs and industry trends to ensure we remain relevant in our direction. Through my customer, market, and industry connection I identify the key problem sets we focus on today, and in the years to come. As the product team(s) execute on their mission, I keep a pulse on their progress and weave in their work into the broader story. I manage, and share the pace of our investment to ensure we are where we need to be for our customers, when they need us there.
- I discuss with customers, regularly and at all levels, their needs and how decisions are made to gain insight into the value of and barriers to satisfying their needs
- I listen to industry leaders and analysts to understand how we can grow our sustainable competitive advantages
- I manage the product feedback activities to decide how to respond to unmet needs
- I maintain an assessment of our product position for each market segment to develop a view as to our strengths and opportunities for growth
- I collect a range of inputs and perspectives to develop a product strategy that guides our investment choices
- I evaluate, clarify, and prioritize the strategic outcomes that we are pursuing
- I partner with design and engineering to research potential outcomes being considered
- I monitor the product health to ensure we are making choices that consider opportunities with an eye towards sustainability
- I align product teams, customer teams, and leadership on our choices
- I monitor the progress of product teams to clarify and remove barriers to achieve meaningful progress
- I partner with design and engineering to prioritize and ensure meaningful progress on tactical and quality work not related to any team’s mission
- I communicate with stakeholders on the progress to enable effective coordination of readiness, awareness, and adoption activities
- I facilitate product risk management to ensure we are making choices that maintain an acceptable level of risk
- I monitor the success measures of past work to understand if we achieved the desired outcomes
- I communicate a product story that connects what we are doing to how it made an impact and why it matters
- I create opportunity for others to tell their part of the product story
- I coach product managers in my group on planning and execution tactics to help them make decisions that balance strategic and tactical impact
- I coach people to reframe their goals in terms of customer and business value
- I share customer stories with our teams to connect their work to how it made and impact and why that was important for the customer
- I share my on-the-job learning and experiences so others can benefit from the added perspective to grow in their roles