How do senior product managers think differently?

“A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat.”

We frequently asked how a product manager could advance to a more senior position. The truth is that getting a promotion can be a difficult process. Yes, your abilities and accomplishments are important, but so are other factors such as how much your manager values talent development, how good and tenured your peers are, how political the company is, and so on.

So, this article is not about how to get promoted to The Product Manager – Anoma Tech but rather about how to think more critically and become a better PM. Anyone, regardless of title, can think like a senior PM and just because someone has the senior PM title doesn’t mean they truly deserve it.

How can you tell if a problem is clear? Some signs of a serious problem include:

“Building a great product is a creative, chaotic process which you won’t get right every time, so you have to also be learning from success and failure.”

You can articulate the impact on the business and the users.

You have a good understanding of the root cause of the problem, and you have decided that this problem, and not others, should be addressed right away.

You can also say that a solution is obvious if:

You are confident that this solution will solve the problem.

You have considered several options, and this one wins in terms of cost/benefit. Your team understands how to implement the solution.

In this article, we will go over the tools you can use in various situations, and then we’ll go over the pitfalls to avoid,

How are we going to ship this quickly?

It all comes down to managing the backlog: Check that the tickets are clearly written, appropriately sized, properly prioritized, and efficiently worked on. It may also include running the ceremonies that allow the team to accomplish the goals, such as sprint planning, refinement, and retro.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

This is the Product Owner’s responsibility in a traditional Scrum team. In larger organizations, frequently see this handled by the tech lead. Don’t worry if you’re fortunate enough to have a good tech lead on your team!

As The Product Manager – Anoma Tech, you add value by:

Ensuring that the engineers understand the work’s vision and context, as well as how it contributes to business goals.

Assisting them in vertically slicing the work into shippable chunks.

Depending on the complexity of the feature, shipping the entire feature could take months. It would be a win if you could find a way to divide the feature into smaller chunks while still providing value to the users. Shipping faster also means receiving user feedback faster, lowering the risk of spending months building the wrong thing.

The Product Manager – Anoma Tech

How can we ensure that we do this correctly?

Here’s where The Product Manager – Anoma Tech testing and experimentation come into play. Before asking the engineers to write code, you should conduct usability testing with a prototype. You could choose to roll out the feature in stages or conduct an A/B test before releasing the winning version.

The various types of tests and experiments are analogous to tools in a toolbox. You must understand what each one does in order to select the appropriate tool for the situation.

Interesting? Read more about product managers at www.anoma.io