Episode 43: Dear Melissa - Answering Questions About Navigating Your Role as a Product Manager
In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about what responsibilities and roles a product manager should take on in various scenarios. She talks through working alongside a UX researcher, responsibilities around maintaining strategy when the bigger picture is unclear, and the do’s and don’ts of working under a new superior.
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Q: When do you think a UX researcher should be involved to support discovery, and what activities should they take on within discovery? [3:21]
A: Dedicated UX researchers tend to come in as a company scales; usually, earlier stage companies don't have UX researchers. The product manager or team will take it on themselves. When you do have a UX researcher, you should be leveraging them for their expertise, which is doing research… I think if you're ever going to do a really big research study, you should definitely go find somebody who knows how to do good user research so that you make sure that you're not wasting all of your time and your energy and getting the wrong results. That’s when I think they should be involved. Think of when the risk is so high that you learn the wrong things from your users; that’s where a UX researcher would come in. [3:35]
Q: How should product managers maintain strategic fit in large corporations, especially in the midst of CEO changes, COVID-19, and new technology trends? How do you balance user-centricity versus internal business value and strategic fit? How am I responsible as a product manager to completely manage all of these vision changes versus what our senior management does, making sure our strategy is adapting? [8:09]
A: You're saying the strategy keeps changing; for COVID, I totally understand, everybody's strategy went out the window, whatever road map you had planned in 2020 was gone in March. But if you are changing your overall strategy constantly and COVID’s not the reason, that’s not right. That's also telling me that strategy from a company level may be set too low. [10:06]
To mitigate these changes as a product manager, I think you have to keep going back and asking them why; like, ‘why are we changing that? What are you trying to achieve?’ Start asking questions to figure out what leadership measures success with. [12:01]
Q: Do you have any advice for navigating the new normal [of having a new superior]? [15:32]
A: Remember you don't get to make the shots anymore. This is now your boss; they're going to set the strategies, they're going to give you direction and now you have to figure out the best way to meet that direction with your parts of the product… You are probably going to be the right hand person because you've got all the domain knowledge… Make sure that you let [your new CPO] know you're at her disposal. [16:13]
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