De grootste uitdaging voor productmanagers?

DOOR CHRISTELIJKE BONILLA OP 25 OKTOBER 2016

Een paar weken geleden nodigde ik Mind the Product-lezers uit deel te nemen aan een korte enquête met een eenvoudig doel: de grootste uitdagingen identificeren die productmanagers in hun rol tegenkomen. Ik ben de 47en van u oprecht dankbaar voor uw mening, waarvan er vele op zichzelf gedetailleerd en inzichtelijk waren. En hoewel dit geen wetenschappelijk onderzoek was, zijn de resultaten richtinggevend en, voor wat het waard is, consistent met mijn ervaringen en die van mijn collega's.

Respondents by Numbers

Hier zijn enkele belangrijke statistieken om u een idee te geven van hoe de respondentenpoel eruit zag:

• 89% van de respondenten had productmanager of productuitvoerderstitels
• 61% van de respondenten werkt voor bedrijfssoftwarebedrijven, terwijl ongeveer 11% in consumentensoftware werkte. 15% werkte voor bedrijven die zowel een bedrijfs- als een consumentenaanbod hadden
• 77% van de reacties kwam uit de Verenigde Staten, met de rest verspreid over het VK, Duitsland, India en anderen.
• Respondenten kwamen uit verschillende bedrijfsgroottes, variërend van startups met minder dan $ 1 miljoen aan jaarlijkse inkomsten tot bedrijven met meer dan $ 100 miljoen aan jaaromzet.

The Big Takeaway: we weten niet of we de juiste producten bouwen

Aside from a few facts about their company and role, we asked respondents to answer a single, open-ended question: What’s your #1 single biggest product management challenge right now? There were no multiple choice options; respondents could write as much or as little as they wanted. Even before we finished bucketing the answers by theme, it was clear what the primary challenge on most product managers’ minds is: setting roadmap priorities without real market feedback.

Across all respondents, 49% product managers said that their foremost challenge is being able to conduct proper market research to validate whether the market truly needs what they’re building. When we look at only the responses from enterprise software PMs, this figure jumps up to 62%.

Here are a few of the typical responses among the many that fell into this bucket:

“I’m trying to make decisions about how to improve the product with no data about which features of the product are most valuable to users."

“Stakeholders clouding the vision not based on evidence. Too many high-level ideas that are added to the roadmap as a “must-have" bug not backed up with validation."

“I am too busy writing specifications to be able to do the important customer feedback, research, and strategic work."

As product managers it’s our job to make sure that the company is building the right product, but many (possibly a majority) of us don’t feel like we’re doing that. In fact, nearly all of the responses in this bucket expressed not having time to do market validation at all. It’s a little sobering when you think about how much time, money and energy is being wasted building features that the market doesn’t want or need. It also tells me that the career development of many product managers is slower than it ought to be.

Turning Challenges into Opportunities

A great product vision comes from knowing your customers so intimately that you can design a product that perfectly meets their needs. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges of managing product at software companies is that the pressure to move fast leads people to substitute their own experiences for market validation. Product failures often trace back to a misunderstanding or outright ignorance of what users (and buyers) really care about.

If these survey results are even partly reflective of the broader set of product professionals (especially in the B2B space), then we all live in a marketplace full of sub-optimal products. As a software user, that’s a little sad. But as a product manager it should excite the hell out of you. Why? Because if most companies do a poor job of vetting what the market wants, it means they’re vulnerable to better solutions built by those who better understand the market. And it is getting easier to do this.

If I could give one piece of advice to any product manager, it would be to choose a way to ask the market directly for feedback and just do it – right now. If your website gets significant traffic, website polls can be a great way to get quick feedback on customer needs. If you want to talk to people who aren’t customers yet, Google Consumer Surveys lets you spin up a survey fast and collect results for as little as $0.10 per response. If you have an email list, you can ping them too with any number of tools. Ask for forgiveness rather than permission and just start doing it.

Just as there are opportunities everywhere for better products based on better customer knowledge, the world will never have too many product managers who are experts at sourcing quality feedback. The ability to capture market feedback and translate it into a coherent vision is the thing you need to be great at. Whenever you find yourself debating feature prioritization with colleagues, be the person who says, “Let’s test this." To paraphrase Jeff Bezos, nothing flattens a hierarchy like customer feedback. Your boss might disagree with your opinions, but it’s a lot harder to brush off direct customer feedback.

I’ve used expert networking firms like Zintro and other, pricier ones before with some success. I’ve actually had the most consistent results cold-messaging people on LinkedIn who looked like my target users and paying them to let me pick their brains for an hour or two.

The most successful product managers tend to be the ones who understand their market best. Invest your time accordingly.

About CHRISTIAN BONILLA

Christian Bonilla is the founder of UserMuse, which connects product and UX teams with hard-to-find subjects for user testing and product feedback. He writes regularly for UserMuse and Fast Company.