Before even you begin reading it further, I would like to throw in a caveat that, by no means, this blog can help you with parenting or become an expert at it. Nor can I claim to give advice on it as with every growing year of my son I just end resetting my parenting skill to that of a noob level. With this disclaimer aside, I think I can get into the real stuff.
When we think about parenting, few things that flash through our minds are sleepless nights, draining energy, and numerous other commitments that come along with it. But apart from teaching us to be more responsible, doing the right parenting implicitly tunes us to become a better Product Manager. This may sound weird to start with and you might be thinking that all who become parents can be good Product Managers. Well, my friend let me stop your juggernaut of judgment and thoughts right there. Doing the right parenting is not implicitly ingrained when you become parents. Doing right parenting just might help you pick up the right traits for the trade.
So what will make you a better product manager? If you are looking ahead at a progression in your career as a Product Manager or trying to become a newbie in this profession, then the below-mentioned guidelines should become the building blocks of your product management DNA. And to help tie these with parenting, I will share my experience with my son.
The top points to remember for successful Product Management are:
Do not look for requirements from the customers, look for the problem.
My busy lifestyle and long hours at and for work obviously leave very little time for me to spend with my son on day to day basis. My subconscious mind somewhere collects the tokens of guilt for this inadequacy at my end. This drives me into a compensatory mode, where I at times implicitly slide into the mode of making my son happy and in this endeavor end up succumbing into fulfilling his demands. So basically, to keep him happy I give in to his demands as requirements and work on fulfilling them. The funny part is most of the times it does meet the end goal of making him happy, but it is not solving his problem. In a similar situation while talking to my son on a lazy Sunday afternoon he comes up with a demand that he wants to go to a mall and to a specific mall. Our denial resulted in an aggravated demand and then him standing with a dejected and droopy face. That just made me succumb to giving in to his demand. So, we finally decided to go, assuming he probably wants to buy a toy or play in the kid activity zone. But what he instead did was, he played with us in the small park housed inside the mall.
A little reflection and it is clear that all that he wanted was to play with us in an open space.
Now if you try reading the above paragraph again carefully, you will understand two common mistakes that we end up doing as a Product Manager.
- When we do not understand our customers well, we given in to their demands as requirements and never get to the actual problem that needs to be solved.
- Assuming and not asking leads to a wrong understanding of the requirement and hence the solution. In the above example, if I made the assumption about what my son wanted to do at the mall, instead of asking him.
So, talking to the customers, understanding their problem, and asking them about their problem is very important. Assuming what they want and taking their demands as requirements will most of the time lead to the wrong solution.
Obsess about your Customer and not the Competition.
The education system in India prepares people for a rat race. My generation of parents have learned to be very competitive and they percolate the same in the coming generation as well. I see parents comparing how their child fares in comparison to others, whether he or she knows more than the rest in the class or in their neighborhood or not. When this behavior exists in abundance and is the part of social DNA, we sometimes tend to fall for it even when we do not want to. Our neighbor’s kid was of the same age as that of our son. They were totally focused on increasing his learning input as much as possible. They always advocated about how their kid was able to solve puzzles with a large number of pieces or how flashcards are helping him retain more information. We did fall for it and started buying puzzles and flashcards for our son and he showed the least possible interest in these. It did cross our mind that how will he cope with the competition if he does not take interest in these activities which might become tools of assessment when he is in school. On the contrary, we found our son fascinated with piling his collection of toys and making imaginary things out of it. To our astonishment, that was helping him learn about things faster, he was observing more and learning in context.
This gives me a very important lesson for my trade. Knowing the competition is fine but obsessing about it or building your strategy based on it, is not. We as Product Manager should always, always be obsessed with our customers and their business problems and try to solve those with the solution which is optimized for our customer ecosystem.
Always look for the Customer’s Feedback
One fine morning I was getting my son ready for school and asked him to wear shoes. He is still in Kinder Garden and thus no restriction of school uniform. He has the liberty to wear whatever he wants. This how the conversation goes:
Me: Wear your shoes fast.
My Son: I do not feel like wearing shoes.
Me: What else will you wear.
My Son: I want to wear Crocs today…
Me: Why?
My Son: I am bored of wearing shoes everyday…
Me: I wear shoes every day to office, I do not get bored…
My Son: You may not be getting bored, but I am…
I have been wearing shoes all throughout my life and for me, that’s a norm. I started taking my son’s response as this generation’s attitude issue. When I told the same to my wife, she said, take it as feedback and do not impose or retrofit your principles or how you see things, on him. This made things clear, and my takeaway was, to always keep an open mind and ears for feedback. It can come in both implicit and explicit forms.
The same holds true for the customers. As Product Managers, Customer feedback is the most valuable insight that we can have. We should always have an open-minded approach to it. We should always be looking out for feedback in verbal, non-verbal, behavior, and actions of the customer.
Do not treat your team as mercenaries but missionaries.
Parenting is not a monologue. For it to be effective it has to be a dialogue, and it will become one only when we team up with our kids to help them do the right thing or make the right choice. Imposing may yield results in the short term but in the long term it might just boomerang. Until an, unless we start treating them as stakeholders in our parenting endeavor and they start understanding it, our parenting philosophy and principles do not reflect in their behavior and actions. A short story below will exhibit the same:
My wife and I decided to be strict about our son having limited or preferably no chocolates for the first couple of years. I was of the opinion that, to achieve this we should be stern with him and strictly tell all our friends and relatives not to offer him one and ask our son not to oblige even if someone offers. My wife was of the opinion that instead of making it order and asking him to execute, let us explain to him the problems, how it is not good for him, etc. It took some time, persistence to explain but it got to him. Even when someone offers him chocolate, he would either reject or come to us with it and ask what he should do. Now he understands that chocolates are not good for him and he should limit the intake.
This story reminds us of how a Product manager should treat his engineering team. He should treat them like Missionaries aligned with him in making the product successful instead of treating them like Mercenaries who just follow your order to execute. As, like parenting, product development is a mission and a mission can only be successful if the executing stakeholders are on Missionary mode rather than Mercenary mode and align in terms of behavior and action to do good by the product.
You can read more about this in the book called Inspired, written by Marty Cagan.
The points listed above, are by no means an exhaustive to-do list for a rock star Product Manager, but rather a good starting point to become an effective one.
Cheers!
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