A Successful Product Manager Has To Know How Their Product Is Built

If a product manager doesn't know how the product they are managing is built there is simply no way for them to be successful as they should be. That is unless they are carried by their team. It is essential that to make coherent and intelligent decisions about a product, that the product manager understands the impact that these decisions might have. The only way to do this is to understand how the product is built.

This doesn't necessarily mean that in a software development project that the product manager has to be a software developer. What it does mean is that the product manager works with the team to understand the implications of decisions. This understanding is facilitated by the product team sitting together. In a scrum sense, this means that the product owner, scrum master and scrum team all sit together. This means when an issue arises everyone in the team knows about it simply through work based conversation. Status meetings become less of a priority when the team sits together as immediately the entire team knows of an issue and can define ways to solve it - together.

By sitting together, even if the product owner is not a software developer, the team as a whole learns the impact of how decisions affect the team and conversely the team gains a finer understanding of why some decisions are made.

If the Scrum team and product owner are not co-located:

• The scrum team has no vision of why decisions are made and what 'north bound' management issues are influencing decisions
• The product owner has less 'south bound' vision of how stake holder issues impact the scrum development process.

The answer to overcome these issues is simple. A product team should sit together. A team that sits together by default will communicate more often, more clearly, solve issues far more quickly and pass on knowledge to each other through osmosis. This means that knowledge is shared without team members even trying to share it. This in turn creates a motivated team that learns together, delivers together and more importantly has fun doing so.

Co-location of a team is a simple mechanism to improve. 

Cheers

Murray

Negative Thought Blocks Creativity

Negative thought blocks creativity. That's it. Sometimes though when you are in an environment where negative energy is allowed to build it becomes challenging to accept ideas that might not be fully thought through. All to often the reaction is "That's not thought through - that's rubbish!". Sometimes this is a challenge to overcome, especially if the environment is in a glut, and not seemingly able to change.

The challenge then is how to overcome this, and how to do something yourself to promote change such that negative energy is not allowed to fester and destroy the creative process. There are many ways to address this, however one simple way is to start with ones self and not simply disengage with someone else's idea as it wasn't your own. Sure some idea's may not be thought through to completion, however this is exactly what the creative, product generation, process is about - working through a series of ideas to come up with a coherent set of engaging product features that your Customers will love.

In an environment where self is valued over team, this can be a real challenge. Nothing can seriously be completed if a creative process involves 10 people in a meeting room shouting over the top of each other, and not actually listening to what each person is saying. An idea needs to be logically explored to it's completion. There are many ways to do this, including hopefully an analysis of data to support a product feature. I think this however is the subject of another story. For now though rest assured that not listening to an idea and not exploring it, is a sure fire way to kill creativity, kill morale, kill team productivity and even worse - kill joy.

So here's a really simple tip. When you are in a creative meeting with others, instead of talking, first listen. Listen to what other people are saying before running with your ideas. If someone then gets in ahead of you with an idea that you think is brilliant, and that you were going to suggest, simply support them with their idea and build consensus that way. If there is an idea that you think is daft, ask the person who suggested it to qualify the use case for the idea and see how it might actually work within a product. Let the person run with the idea and provide support, if needed, and let their creativity flow into consensus. Who knows, that daft person might be the one who is actually thinking outside the business realm that you find yourself stuck in, and might actually be opening an entirely new stream of revenue for you.

Listening, promoting others to run with their ideas, and encouraging them to think freely by offering support to work through a thought into a deliverable concept, is going to pay off quickly.  This will generate a self motivated team that enjoy working together. This is a team that will want to deliver yours and their ideas, and turn them into a reality. What's more as they are a motivated team it is most likely they will exceed the Customer expectations as they will always want to deliver more than is promised.

Alternatively, as you are always right you could simply dismiss all ideas that aren't your own. You could do this, but when your delivery vehicle, i.e. your team, get that idea and are allowed to run with it to release, that run will most likely turn into a slow walk.

Cheers

m