By Stacey Weber
One of the most difficult things about being a product manager is that you’re confronted with every failure, real or imagined. If development falls behind schedule, they’ll (hopefully) come to you with the information. When an executive makes a promise to a large customer, you’ll be the one expected to deliver. If Sales signs a contract for custom development, it’s your roadmap that might need to be adjusted. Change is naturally frightening for most people, but it’s a constant in product management.
Ronald Reagan gave us a mantra for managing the rate of change:
“Don’t be afraid to see what you see.”
Remember that you are the bridge between your company and your market….and you won’t please everyone. Instead, search for facts to guide your decision.
When you’re worried or angry, it’s hard to think clearly. This is a fact of human existence; if you ignore your own emotions, they will still impact your thinking.
The first software product I worked on was a down-market play on mailing software, intended to help people manage their small contacts database and do one-off marketing. I had joined the team as an intern, and I was assigned to test this pre-release product.
I didn’t know anything about testing software, and there was no information about the intended usage or target market. The engineer on this product was a self-educated, intelligent, outspoken guy who I interacted with entirely by phone. I could relay many stories of the struggles we had getting along and agreeing about who would use the product and how. Let’s just say, we both learned a lot – and eventually, we reached those early milestones together. We launched the product, trained sales, and celebrated the product’s first revenue.
Unfortunately, both Word and WordPerfect were improving their functionality for managing contacts and doing mail merges – which left us with only one clear market advantage. We had the ability to check addresses and properly format them, since we were using a proprietary engine that was certified by the USPS to do this work – and we thought that was a very big deal.
As the months passed, and revenue continued to be low and spotty, we all had to accept the facts and stop throwing good money after bad. It was HARD to accept that our baby, this thing that we had nurtured and released despite our struggles, could not compete the way we had hoped.
Within a few years, I had moved into product management. I reflected on that experience, and often reminded myself to do the research first – and avoid building products that solved problems no one cared about. We needed to see the facts to guide that decision, but the most difficult part was calming our personal fear of failure so that we could accept the facts before us.
Don’t be afraid to see what you see.