Three Touchpoints for Successful Product Managers
Introduction
Every project you work on as a Product Manager has a key risk. How do you translate your UX Designs and Product Requirements into development tasks that create what you’ve worked so hard to define? How do you do that work with any kind of predictability? The secret lies in how you move work from design to development. In this article, I’ll outline a technique that I call the three touchpoints. It is easy to implement and quick to deliver value, and I’ll show you how.
I’m making a few assumptions — that you’re working in software (as my experience is mainly in SaaS products), and that you’re working with a User Experience or Product Designer. I’m also hoping that your team is working in some flavor of agile development process. I’ll refer to a Tech Lead, who could be any senior engineer on the team. With those disclaimers, let’s get to the good stuff!
Touchpoint 1: Pre-Discovery
When you are starting work on a project, spend some time with both your UX Designer and your Tech Lead. Give them the background and context for the problem you’re trying to solve, why it matters to the business, and what the outcome is you’re trying to achieve. Once you answer any questions, dig into a few important topics:
Have we done something like this before?
Is there existing technology we could use to solve this problem?
Is there technical debt or other challenges in the area of our product that we’re going to be working?
Are there other technical considerations or limitations?
Are there performance or security risks we should consider?
What type of design assets would help aid in the discovery?
It is essential that you spend some time understanding what you have to work with, what barriers you may encounter, and most importantly, that both your UX Designer and Tech Lead start to think about the potential solutions.
Touchpoint 2: Finalizing Requirements
As you start to wrap up discovery and have a draft of both requirements and a UX design, get together with both the UX Designer, Tech Lead, and the development team who’ll be working on the project. Start by reviewing the context of the project — the problem you’re solving, the scope of the solution, the business value, and the outcomes you want. Review your requirements and designs with them and elicit feedback. There are two benefits to bringing your development team into the process:
Engineers have lots of thoughts and ideas about how something should be built. You need to gather feedback from them as stakeholders. Some of the best ideas have come from these feedback sessions. They know how software typically works and can point out things you haven’t considered. It is also an opportunity to identify things in the design that may be extremely difficult or expensive to build, which you will want to avoid. They may have suggestions on how to achieve the same outcome more quickly. There may be performance implications that you haven’t considered, or other technical considerations. Incorporating their feedback also creates a shared sense of ownership of the project.
If a developer is asked to work on something they have not seen before, their focus will be on what is wrong with the design. This is an unneeded distraction. I remember those meetings myself, where as a developer I was expected to break down and estimate designs that had obvious problems to me. If I had an opportunity to share feedback and gain context around the project, I would have been more focused on doing the work at hand.
Touchpoint 3: Work Breakdown
Before diving into the grooming process and breaking down the work, take a moment to re-establish the context. Review the problem, solution, business value, and expected outcomes. It might feel redundant for Product Managers, but it's beneficial since the team has been focused on different tasks between touchpoints. Context setting is invaluable. After revisiting the context and addressing any questions, proceed with the standard grooming process. Techniques for work breakdown will be discussed in future articles.
Conclusion
This process is simple, yet effective. The repeated context and collaborative approach will help you and your team deliver better value, faster. It will also empower the developers writing the code to understand the complete narrative, leading to superior decision-making.
Product Manager Career Matrix
Introduction
I’ve developed this career matrix over the years and use it with every product manager that I work with. As a product leader, it provides a consistent framework for evaluating and coaching team members. I typically create a copy of the matrix for each product manager and ask them to rank themselves across every skill. We use that as a basis for goals and professional development. One key point is to talk through any areas where your evaluation as a manager is different than the product managers.
Job Levels
As companies grow, their compensation plan should formalize. This career matrix is based on the idea that there is a structure of some sort that you need to coordinate with. You may need to adapt the labels or number of levels to match your company’s structure at the moment. If your company doesn’t have a job level structure or formal compensation bands, this can start to build a structure to ensure that you’re paying consistently across your team.
It is critical that you have both a management and an individual contributor track so that your team members do not feel that management is the only path forward.
| Job Level | Job Title | Typical Years of Experience | Track |
|---|---|---|---|
| PM1 | Associate Product Manager | 0-1 | Individual Contributor |
| PM2 | Junior Product Manager | 1-2 | Individual Contributor |
| PM3 | Product Manager | 2-4 | Individual Contributor |
| PM4 | Senior Product Manager | 3-5 | Individual Contributor |
| PM5 | Principle Product Manager | 5+ | Individual Contrubitor |
| PM6 | Group Product Manager | 5+ | Manager |
| PM7 | Director of Product | 7+ | Manager |
Job Skills
This career matrix separates skills into five different categories and explores how those skills should be manifested at various levels of experience. I use the following rating system for each skill:
Learning the skill (L) — Actively learning a skill by observing, reading, and listening.
Practicing with assistance (P) — Using a skill in public, but with support from a more senior team member to provide feedback and guidance.
Doing solo (S) — Able to use the skill without support with little need for feedback or support.
Mastering (M) — Strong grasp of the skill with no need for feedback or support.
Teaching / Mentoring (T) — Expert in the skill and able to effectively teach and support team members who are learning the skill.
Core Product
| Skill | Description | PM1 | PM2 | PM3 | PM4 | PM5 | PM6 | PM7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Collaboration | Demonstrates a strong ability to collaborate on projects. This means everything from working together to defining a problem, the solution, and the outcomes we are trying to achieve. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Creative Problem Solving | Curate solutions to problems in new and creative ways, always focused on getting the best result possible for our customers and the business. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Discovery | Discovery is the process for learning what problems exist for our customers and how important they are to solve. Includes understanding competitors, market trends, customer needs, and our business strategy. Ability to interview customers, collect feedback from stakeholders, and synthesize learnings from gathered data. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Design Prototyping | Design Prototyping is the process for going from a problem to a solution. It involves working closely with UX and Dev to explore potential solutions and vetting them with internal stakeholders, customers, and potential customers. This also encompases defining the requirements of what a solution delivers. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Work Breakdown | Work breakdown is the art of taking a design and turning it into actionable work for the dev team. This includes both doing high level estimates and more specific epic and story breakdown and acceptance criteria. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Manging Scope | Managing scope is the art of deciding how much of a solution we should deliver for the current iteration. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Prioritization | Prioritization is the process of determining what work is important. It is a balance of what customers need, what the business wants, what is strategic to the product, current technical needs, and risk and compliance considerations. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Roadmap | Build a roadmap that illustrates the work we want to accomplish over the next few quarters. Be able to define the problem, the current scope, business value, and desired outcomes. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Product Vision | Define a product vision and strategy that aligns with the business strategy and resonates with internal stakeholders and customers | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Documentation | Create technical documentation about how a feature works. | L | P | S | M | M | T | |
| Product Support | Assisting the Live and CSM teams with complex production situations and use cases. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
Communication
| Skill | Description | PM1 | PM2 | PM3 | PM4 | PM5 | PM6 | PM7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saying No, Nicely | Be able to kindly say no to something, leaving the asker validated. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Communicating Timelines | Delivering clear communication about the state of the roadmap as a whole, a particular project, or feature of interest. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Managing Up | Develops effective communication strategies with leadership team so they are constantly informed and aligned with the work we are doing. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Conflict Resolution | Handles potentially hostile situations with frustrated clients, prospects, or projects and kindly creates alignment and a way forward. | L | P | S | M | T | T |
Execution
| Skill | Description | PM1 | PM2 | PM3 | PM4 | PM5 | PM6 | PM7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project Management | Skills related to organizing, defining, building, and delivering software functionality. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Project Complexity | Manages scope and complexity of solution for roadmap items. | L | P | S | M | M | T | |
| Release Coordination | Working with the development team and delivery manager to facilitate the release of a particular feature. | L | P | S | M | M | T | |
| Agile Development Process | Understand and be able to guide teams through various development methodologies | L | P | S | M | M | T |
Product Operations
| Skill | Description | PM1 | PM2 | PM3 | PM4 | PM5 | PM6 | PM7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data Analysis | Ability to understand, evaluate, and compare data. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Market Analysis | Ability to analyze market size, opportunity, and evaluate competitive intelligence. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Analytics/ Measuring Outcomes | Creating KPIs, metrics, and data insights to prove that a particular change achieved the desired outcome. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Product Demos | Demonstrating the functionality, purpose, and key uses of a new or existing feature to internal stakeholders or clients. | L | P | S | M | M | T | T |
| Product Training and Enablement | Building internal content and processes to successfully enable teams to sell, demo, support, and enable clients to use new functionality as it is released. | L | P | S | M | T | T |
Leadership
| Skill | Description | PM1 | PM2 | PM3 | PM4 | PM5 | PM6 | PM7 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Managing Stakeholders | Builds effective relationships of trust with stakeholders across the business, including helping them align on the way we work and what we deliver. | L | P | S | M | M | T | |
| Drive Alignment | Creates alignment across the business that ensures that key stakeholders are aligned to our approach. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Lead By Influence | Demonstrates the ability to lead by influence while not having direct control on the teams and stakeholders that we work with. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Mentorship | Acts as a coach and mentor to help less experienced team members build their skills and deliver successfully. | L | P | S | M | T | T | |
| Team Management | Is an effective people manager, coach, and servant leader. Demonstrates the ability to mentor with authority and help everyone achieve their best work. | P | L | L | S |