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Mind the Product

Guest Post

Building for change: When transformation and product management meet

Product Development

What are product features? Definition, examples, and 5 types

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Lessons from my first year as a Prod Ops Manager

How Google makes AI work at Enterprise scale – Miku Jha (Director, AI/ML and Generative AI, Google Cloud)

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Rosemary King

For the past two months, I’ve been conducting research and discovery to help establish some ground rules for the Mind the Product Training Program.  As an organization we’ve set some goals for what we want to accomplish with our training. These are:
<ul>
<li>To offer the same best in class experience that our Mind the Product conference attendees get when they come to our events.</li>
<li>To serve our core MTP audience of experienced product managers who want to continue to grow their already in-depth skill sets.</li>
<li>To bring our training to as many of our Product Tank communities as possible.</li>
<li>To impart lessons that product managers can apply immediately in their jobs.</li>
</ul>
So with all this in mind, I’ve been looking at and collecting data which inform how we achieve these goals.
<h2>Tell me What you Want</h2>
But, having analyzed the data, I’ve found that what product managers say they want differs quite a lot from what they state they need. What do I mean by this? The training subjects that product managers list as those they are most interested in do not line up with the areas where they say have the greatest challenges.
Mind the Product sent out a survey to its community in 2016 and 1,200 product managers from five continents responded. I randomly selected 350 responses and analyzed the responses to the following two questions:
<ul>
<li>What do you feel your biggest challenge as product manager is?</li>
<li>What topics are you most interested in learning about?</li>
</ul>
Stakeholder communication was the biggest challenge &#8211; by 12%. But this answer took many forms, some respondents simply stated stakeholder communication or stakeholder management.  Others called it “problems with alignment”, “difficulty getting buy-in from higher-ups”, “keeping all the teams on the page”.
So I expected to see training on communication, alignment and presentation skills rise to the top of desired skills list, based on this data.  But the most requested training topics were user research, conducting user interviews and metrics and KPIs.
<h2>Obstacles and Takeaways</h2>
So let’s state the takeaway that we can draw from these two pieces of data: product managers are most interested in understanding how to improve and optimize their products, but reporting out and discussing their work with the wider organization creates obstacles.
This quantitative analysis helped me to formulate an interview script that I used in the qualitative research round that followed.  When do our product managers feel they encounter the most difficulty in communication? Where do they feel most confident in their own work?  How do they currently work with their greater organizations?  How do they work with their teams? Where do they feel they miss the most opportunities to improve their products, why?
I can’t give away the store, but following these two rounds of research and analysis, the main takeaway is that any conversations around specific and tangible skills should and must be coupled with lessons about the value of the work, how to explain it, and how to report out about it.
Do you agree?  What’s your biggest challenge as a product manager?  How does it line up with the skills you are most interested in learning? I look forward to hearing from you.

core/freeform

Product Management

It’s the Strategy, stupid – Andrew Martinez-Fonts (VP Product, Honeysales)

LLM workflows for product managers: 3 key takeaways (Niloufar Salehi, Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley) – ProductTank SF

How to survive the next phase of tech – Jonty Sharples (Product and Strategy Consultant)

Transformed: Moving to the product model by Marty Cagan

Product teams in flux – Pendomonium+#mtpcon roadshow: Berlin

AI in practice at Berlin’s leading companies – Pendomonium+#mtpcon roadshow: Berlin

Product teams in flux – Pendomonium+#mtpcon roadshow: Amsterdam

Product teams in flux – Pendomonium+#mtpcon roadshow: London

What’s next for product management in 2024? Nichole Mace (SVP Product and User Experience, Pendo)

“You’re not as competent as you think” 5 lessons from Ken Chin on navigating a product career (CPO, Spark Networks)

Training: What’s the Biggest Challenge for Product Managers?

Rosemary King

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