One of the most undefined roles in the world of tech is that of a Product Manager (PM). A Product Manager owns the overall product experience but none of the engineers who actually build the product report to them. If you think the role is odd, then you aren’t mistaken.
But ambiguously defined roles like these attract people like me, who cannot be neatly boxed into any one particular function. One of the many hats I wear in this role is that of a detective. Obviously, I don’t solve crimes and the only encounter I’ve had with a real detective is in the books of Arthur Conan Doyle. Then why do I compare my role to that of a detective?
I represent the voice of the customer in the team. Being the voice requires managing diverse information sources about the customer. I tend to look at these information sources in the form of a matrix. The two axes of this matrix represent the structure of this data and how it was acquired. Let’s take two examples to understand this better. Support tickets are a treasure trove of qualitative information on the issues users are facing in the product. They are initiated by the user and hence its acquisition is passive. Now let’s take a look at A/B testing in the diagonally opposite quadrant. A/B tests are, in its essence, questions posed by the Product team to the user and thus a form of active data acquisition. The data you acquire from an A/B test is quantitative and needs to be interpreted based on statistical analysis. Just like a detective would, a Product Manager must pick and choose the information sources (and the quadrants) which make sense for the customer and users they represent. This is more of an art, trained by intuition, than an exact science.
However, data alone isn’t enough to make solid product decisions. I can’t emphasize more the importance of stitching together a narrative based on the information. Collecting data for the sake of it is akin to the popular management consulting philosophy – boiling the ocean. It’s important to form the set of hypotheses and questions first which will help you understand the customer better and advance the cause of your product. I personally like it when the narrative reads like a story with the product personas forming the central characters.
In the end, like a detective, a PM needs to rely on their instincts to make decisions. Over many cycles of taking successful or unsuccessful product decisions, a PM builds their intuition for the product and the customer. For me, this is the most attractive part of this profession (and the riskiest as well).
Yash Tambawala 