Common Mistakes for New Product Managers

Sep 30, 2021

4 Min Read

It’s possible that some products aren’t very beneficial or don’t work as they were intended to. Perhaps they were too tough to learn or understand, or maybe they just didn’t sell. It’s a fact of life. A good team will be prepared for the likelihood of blunders because product managers and owners are human.

However, some occurrences happen so regularly that it may be stated that they lead to the creation of substandard items in the first place. You may prevent some of the most common mistakes by following these tips.

Product managers experience extreme highs and lows on a daily basis, some several times a day. After a while, you become used to releasing a highly wanted feature and then being buried by a mountain of issues, but that sensation never really goes away completely. In addition, the task inspires in you a great deal of humility, agility, and determination.

A few frequent mistakes that new and aspiring Project Managers make in the hopes of assisting them to navigate their own ups and downs as they learn about product management.

In some cases, though, things happen so frequently that they might actually be attributed to the creation of defective items.

Here is a list of dangers that can destroy a product, and how to prevent them.

  • Customer needs and wants, however, are not always clear. Or, what they seek isn’t conceivable to achieve. Due to the fact that customers are unaware of what is attainable, they rely on you to inform them.
  • To deliver value to customers, innovation must take place in the framework of an overall vision and a strategic plan.
  • When it comes to what we want, we have different criteria than when it comes to what the customer wants. Products should be shown to the target audience by product managers, and teams should do usability testing.
  • A product’s buyer may have a different motivation than its user, therefore it’s important for the product team to know what types of individuals will be utilizing it.
  • It is not always the case that a feature is equivalent to a benefit. The product’s benefits must be clear and convincing.
  • There was a bug-free product built by a development team. Nevertheless, Quality Assurance is usually helpful in this process if the user doesn’t see any benefit.

Underpowered

Product Managers will be underpowered if management doesn’t completely trust them or if they aren’t given adequate authority.

As a result, the Product Managers will have a difficult time completing his or her duties. In some cases, the Strum development team, stakeholders, and customers may not all be in agreement with each other. This can lead to delays, which can harm the team’s morale.

Overworked

Nobody benefits from being overworked, and neither do the Product Managers. In addition, it can lead to obstructions, which can slow down the project’s progress. For the Agile framework to be successful, Product Managers who are overworked can result in an unattended backlog and missing team events.

For a variety of reasons, Product Managers can be overworked. They can’t do their job because they don’t have enough time or because they don’t have adequate assistance from their colleagues. Typically, this occurs when the Product Manager is responsible for too many teams.

If the Product Manager isn’t getting adequate support from the team, then there’s a divide in the notion of Product Ownership. Because of this, he should be assigned to only one team at a time.

Miscommunication

There might be issues with miscommunication, mistrust, and delayed progress when Product Managers and their teams are separated. Due to the fact that regular face-to-face communication is essential for success, all Product Managers should relocate so that they can be with their teams.

A Product Manager must spend as much time with his team and attend all planning, review, and meetings if relocation is not possible. Face-to-face meetings can still take place even if you’re not in the same physical area.

Expectations from users

When a feature doesn’t work, be brave and humble enough to confess it. That it was a tremendous technical problem to implement doesn’t bother your end-user at all. Nobody cares that it took four weeks and three full-time engineers to develop. That you may lose some respect among your teammates for admitting defeat is irrelevant to them.

What your user cares about is that their experience using your app is degraded because a feature isn’t what they need it to be. Solve for your user. If a feature isn’t working and you’re talking to users early and often, you’ll know when something isn’t working. Further, you should be able to measure everything that goes on in your app, so you’ll have data to back up your assessment that a feature isn’t cutting it.

Focusing only on SOLUTIONS

You probably love to fix problems if you’re a product manager or are considering becoming one – it’s in your DNA. However, thinking exclusively in terms of prospective answers is problematic. It prevents you from focusing on the problem at all. Because you’re limiting your thoughts to a limited subset of answers, there’s a danger in doing this: Make sure you understand not only their pain but also what causes it, in order to give the ideal answer.

Another important dimension of this problem is that you as a product manager are really the owner of problems more than solutions. Your engineers are the ones who should really propose and own the solutions. If you’ve gotten attached to a solution too early, you haven’t fully leveraged your engineering team for all of their many talents.

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