You and Your Management Team

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Do curso por University of Virginia

Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals

322 ratings

University of Virginia

Digital Product Management: Modern Fundamentals

322 ratings

Not so long ago, the job of product manager was about assessing market data, creating requirements, and managing the hand-off to sales/marketing. Maybe you’d talk to a customer somewhere in there and they’d tell you what features they wanted. But companies that manage product that way are dying. Being a product person today is a new game, and product managers are at the center of it. Today, particularly if your product is mostly digital, you might update it several times a day. Massive troves of data are available for making decisions and, at the same time, deep insights into customer motivation and experience are more important than ever. The job of the modern product manager is to charter a direction and create a successful working environment for all the actors involved in product success. It’s not a simple job or an easy job, but it is a meaningful job where you’ll be learning all the time. This course will help you along your learning journey and prepare you with the skills and perspective you need to: Create the actionable focus to successfully manage your product (week 1) Focus your work using modern product management methods (week 2) Manage new products and explore new product ideas (week 3) Manage and amplify existing products (week 4) This course is ideal for current product or general managers interested in today's modern product management methods. This course was developed with the generous support of the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

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Achieving Focus and #Winning

As a product manager, you and your team will always have more ideas and more requests than you can possibly manage. Making matters still more complicated, part of your job is to develop and then ‘sell’ a particular view of what should happen with your product to diverse stakeholders (engineering, marketing, etc.). How do you do it? Success requires an actionable, testable focus. The successful product manager identifies vivid, testable customer outcomes and creates focus around them. This week we’ll show you how to interface effectively with all your stakeholders to create that actionable focus.

You and Your Design Team4:51

You and Your Development Team4:41

Product Manager vs. Product Owner8:10

Greg Cohen on PM vs. PO?8:27

What Is Data Science?3:12

You and Your Data Science Team6:18

Meet Enable Quiz, Our Startup Company Example3:58

You and Your Consulting and/or Support Team5:04

Focal Tool: The Customer Journey4:17

Nastia Root on Creating a Strong Interface with Support4:59

You and Your Sales and Marketing Team7:55

You and Your Finance/Accounting and Legal Teams4:53

You and Your Project Manager3:25

You and Your Management Team4:24

Week 1 Takeaways1:02

Conheça os instrutores

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow
Darden School of Business

In this video, we're going to show you how to create a strong,

productive interface with your management team.

By management team, I mean your manager and then any other kind of contact or

material you need to provide to the rest of management.

Now, your input from the management team should be an understanding

of the company's strategy, business model, and

key objectives that they want you to focus on.

And then as best as possible you want to understand that through the lens

of your particular product or area.

And you may need to help your management through that with you.

And your output back to them is, of course,

your results from managing the product.

And what you want to make sure of is that you have a nice, clear,

actionable understanding of what's on their A list.

But one that gives you the freedom of action to pursue creative

solutions around your product.

If this doesn't work, there's a lot of failure modes.

You may feel like this place, I'm just not bought in,

it seems like a lot of things they do are stupid.

And this can happen, and hey, I'm not saying you're never not going to be right.

But this reminds me of a story that Donald Norman told to my class here at Darden

a couple of years ago when he was speaking to us.

Donald Norman is the author of Design of Everyday Things,

a very influential designer through the last several decades.

And so he said, designers will come to me and say,

Professor Norman, I could be successful if only my company would

let me build the product that the customer really wants.

And he would say to them, well, look, if you think they're not letting you do that,

why don't you use your design skills and have a little empathy for

why aren't they letting you do that?

Because there's a lot of things that a business needs to do that may

not be apparent to you.

And they need to sell stuff, they need to put stuff through some kind of a channel

and it has to be perhaps consistent with the rest of their stuff.

So make sure you understand those things.

And that's kind of my take on this.

You'll do the best for yourself if you make an effort

to make sure you understand what's on management's A list and why.

And we want our managers to be perfect, they're not, I'm certainly not.

And some of them are really good at certain things and not others, and

you may need to kind of help them help you understand those things

a little bit better.

The other failure mode is that you're off doing stuff and they're telling you,

what you did is really neat, but actually there really are these other things that

are really what are on my A list.

Now, I'm not telling you to just get a to-do list and stick to that,

because that's not what a good product manager does.

They get this envelope, but they operate within that.

I'm also not saying don't ever go outside the envelope and pursue something you just

think is incredibly cool, because it might be a good idea.

But you just want to balance that with your understanding of what's really

on the businesses' A list.

Because they're depending on a whole portfolio of people to execute around

the core business, for the business itself to make sense.

And then finally, if you dump a lot of hard problems on your manager,

if they're good, they're going to do their best to help you.

But I can tell you it's almost certainly their least favorite part of the job.

And product managers are notoriously effective at dealing with this problem

where they have a lot of responsibility and relatively little formal authority.

And honestly, I'll be totally frank, that can be very frustrating and

really challenging.

So if you think that you're going to have trouble with that,

then product management might not be quite the right role for you.

Or maybe that's just a spot that you need to put special emphasis on kind of

practicing and thinking about how you can persuade and influence people and

kind of sell them on your point of view, rather than just giving them directions.

So that's my advice about managing your management team.

Managing upwards is about understanding what's important to them and

translating that into a set of things that you're going to do where you have,

on the one hand, freedom of action, but you also have some very specific results,

so you can show them how well you're doing.

Or if you're having a problem, you can kind of narrow it down with them and

talk about why we're not able to move the needle on this thing.

Do you need more resources?

Do you need a different charter?

And that is the stuff that I think is most important for

creating a successful interface with your management.

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