Overview
Are you an experienced Product Delivery Manager? Have a BA background? Passionate about all things digital and have a keen interest in working with teams and products that inspire and solve everyday problems?
Experience in a project management, BA, product development or user experience roles is ideal, along with working within an agile/lean environment.
Description
Good vs Great
1. A good product manager relies on data, and takes decisions backed by data. A great product manager is data driven but also has a holistic picture. Data alone might be misleading at times. For instance, you can add a game on the e-commerce company app, and that will increase the engagement of the users. But is that game adding value to the customer’s experience? Is it helping you achieve any business objective? This are the kind of questions great product managers ask.
2. A good product manager would do what they are asked to do. They would rely on someone else’s business objectives and assume that others who are higher up in the hierarchical order, are sure of what they want and know what it will impact. A great product manager knows that they don’t have a holistic picture. They just know the impact of that particular initiative on their function or their metric. They know that they don’t have the time to delve in detail, nor do they know the full impact of that feature on other aspects like consumer experience, or the flow. Only a great product manager knows the overall impact of the tiniest of changes. Thus, they will always question their beliefs, challenge their assumptions and will make them understand the complete picture . They would not just say Yes to a feature because someone high up in the hierarchy has asked for it.
3. A good product manager takes customer feedback and builds everything for the customers. A great product manager knows that sometimes even the customers don’t know what they want, so building what they ask for does not always solve the purpose. He takes customers feedback and does what he thinks will be best for the product and the customers in a long run. “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” — Henry Ford
4. A good product manager creates many nice features. They believe that ‘more features = better product’ A great product manager identifies the core of the product and only adds features that are meaningful to the customers and business. They prevent the software from becoming bloat-ware.
5. A good product manager multitasks. They handle multiple initiatives and says Yes to a lot of things. A great product manager exhibits great focus. Focus doesn’t mean saying ‘no’ to things that they wasn’t going to do. What it means is, saying no to something that they think is a phenomenal idea but ends up saying no to it because he is focusing on something else. A great product manager has this important attribute of saying ‘no’ to distractions and noise.
6. A good product manager follows all the best practices, standards and guidelines. A great product manager challenges the standards and questions the approach. They do ground up thinking and doesn’t limit their thinking to the existing standards. This attribute is the birthing ground for disruptive solutions. While the good product managers follow standards, great product managers create new standards.
7. A good product manager wants perfection the first time. They take extra time to ship a product/feature perfectly. A great product manager knows to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and iterative development models. They build prototypes in a way, that an idea can be validated in 1-2 weeks before building the complete feature whereas a good product manager takes extra time to build a ‘perfect’ feature only to realise later that it doesn’t work with customers.
8. A good product manager knows what they are doing next and has clear immediate targets. A great product manager is a visionary. They know the short term goals, but they also have clarity on where they want the product to finally be in the long term. In their mind, the ultimate destination is always clear. They might sometimes sacrifice short term benefits for long term ones. This would never be the case with a good product manager as they always see short term benefits first.