15 Product Management Best Practices

While 2022 proved to be a great year for Product Managers despite the hiring freezes implemented by top tech companies, 2023 is shaping up to be an even better year for PMs. In one of our previous blogs, we discuss how Product Management is still an in-demand job position. However, in the coming year, more PMs might be needed as big technological leaps are predicted to happen.

We will see a continuation in innovation and progress with transformative technologies such as the internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, and blockchain. Additionally, customer experience will be the deciding factor when purchasing products or services.

What does this mean for a Product Manager? With these kinds of business trends coming in, it’s also expected that companies will be vying to hire the best talents in their respective industries to develop products that address the exact needs of customers.

To be great at managing products and to keep up with the demands of time, you have to know the best Product Management practices that will allow you to be ready for another fast-paced year.

Product Management Best Practices Every PM Should Know

When you’re just starting out as a Product Manager or you plan to break into Product Management, you have to know the best practices in product management that will help you do your responsibilities skillfully. We have listed down fifteen that you can review:

1. Familiarize Yourself with Current Processes

When you’re a PM at a new company, it’s vital that the first thing you do is familiarize yourself with the processes and procedures that are already in place. Rarely will a new PM start off with a blank slate. Most likely, the teams would have already been working on something for weeks or months. It’s necessary for you to understand the current project and its progress, as well as how things work, for you to do a great job.

2. Prioritizing and Making the Correct Trade-Offs

You’re going to make a lot of important decisions as a PM. One of the most critical decisions that you can make is how to spend your resources. This is where your prioritization skills come in. You need to evaluate the relevance of decisions, work, ideas, and requests so you can prevent wasting resources and still deliver value to the end user.

3. Understand Company Goals

In your current company, how is success measured? What type of metrics matters most to the executives and stakeholders? What are the main pain points that you are solving? As soon as you have the answers to these questions, you can be a proponent of the executives, your team, as well as the customers. Although you won’t be able to please everyone, you have to find a way to strike a balance.

4. Empower Your Team

There are so many things that a PM has to deal with daily. There are loads of meetings to be had with different departments, and there are loads of questions to be answered as well. Although meetings will always be part of your daily tasks, you can empower your team to make their own decisions. This way, you have more time on your hands and your team is dealing with tasks or questions that they can handle themselves.

You can make criteria for when a question can be escalated to you. What you can also do is build context in order to create a shared mind where everyone understands the “why” behind priorities, decisions, or work. 

5. Use Your Own Product

It’s an advantage to have your products tested by users but there’s an even greater advantage when you test them yourself. You’re one of the best people who can tell if there’s something to be changed or improved because you know your product inside out. From the development process to launching, you should know your product well.

6. Connect with Your End Users

Aside from you using your own product, you should always prioritize the feedback of your end users. After all, you’re developing the product for them. The product won’t be so successful if no one wants to use it. It’s a Product Management best practice to always be in touch with your user to hear how they like (or don’t like) your product or feature.

7. Monitor Performance Metrics

As a PM, it’s mandatory for you to check if the product you launched is a success or not. Your hypothesis should be based on data-driven key performance indicators (KPIs). There are several that you can take note of but some of the top five KPIs that your organization will likely focus on are:

It’s important to remember that the KPIs will differ from organization to organization.

8. Practice Continuous Discovery

Continuous discovery happens even before product development. It mostly answers the “why” of the product. Touching base with customers as well as market research is part of this phase. Although tedious, continuous discovery is going to give you valuable insights into how useful your product can be. It also gives the company that you’re working for an edge over its competitors because you have a deep knowledge of the market and trends.

9. Get Information from Your Sales and Support Teams

Even though you’re connecting with your end users as a PM, it’s always good to review the type of information your sales team has. Most likely they will have data about how the end user is using the product (as opposed to the idea of how the end user should use the product). There could be some valuable insight there that you’re missing. The same is true with your support team. You can sit in on support calls to discover common complaints, usage issues, and more.

10. Influence without Authority

In one of our recent blogs, we talk about how PMs need to lead without authority. The truth is, no one in product development and engineering teams report directly to the Product Manager. So, the PM’s power is very limited to his or her influence. A PM should hone the skill of convincing everyone to support this or that decision without exercising their authority over their team.

11. Learn to Say No

One of the many difficult decisions that you will make as a Product Manager is to say NO to propositions that don’t align with the product vision. You won’t be able to please everyone. The earlier that you will learn this, the better. You’ll need to develop a thick skin because it’s simply impossible to say yes to everything or to every proposal.

12. Practice Strategic Prioritization

It’s one of the many Product Management best practices to strategize what you will prioritize. In terms of features or improvements, plan them out according to your initiatives (which should be connected to your goals). Send this to your development team so they can break down each priority into technical requirements. You can work efficiently when you practice strategic prioritization because it leaves less room for your team to ask, “So, what’s next?”

13. Collaboration is Key

Make sure that you understand the value of each team you work with. Remember that you have to work with different teams to launch a great product so it’s essential to understand that every team matters. From development, marketing, sales, support, and design, you need to be contacting each one frequently to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the timeline established to launch the product is being followed.

14. Hone Your Emotional Intelligence

When it comes to Product Management, it’s the soft skills that truly matter. Definitely, hard skills such as knowing a certain programming language will help you do your job, especially if your product is more on the technical side. However, your soft skills or emotional intelligence will allow you to work with people better. Product Management is mostly about working effectively with others so it’s your emotional intelligence that will allow you to excel as a PM.

15. Connect with Peers in the Product Management Community

It’s always an advantage to be active in the Product Management community. There are things that only PMs can experience so belonging to a community will be a way for you to connect with others who have the same interests or concerns as you. Career-wise, it’s always good to have a network of PMs that can give you advice or give you feedback on something. If you would like to know more about building a network as a Product Manager, check out: How to Build a Network: A Guide for Product Managers.

Product Management Best Practices: Conclusion

Companies are going to want to stay ahead of the curve in developing great products. They won’t be able to do this consistently without Product Managers who work incessantly to advocate for the customers’ needs, hold the product team together to meet deadlines and address issues, and keep the key stakeholders informed and aligned.

On the other hand, as a Product Manager, you have to take it upon yourself to keep learning, improving, and innovating especially when it comes to Product Management best practices that you apply to your daily operations.

Are you ready to become a Product Manager? You’d have to ace your Product Manager Interview first by doing the following recommended preparation steps:

If you would like to learn more about the preparation process for PM interviews, check out Product Manager Interview Prep: 2022 Guide.

FAQ

What is a Product Management practice?

Yes, Product Management is the practice of developing, improving, and launching products or features that solve customer problems and that bring profit to the company. 

What are the four 4 critical skills of Product Managers?

Product Managers have a diverse skill set that allows them to navigate through the complex processes of developing and releasing useful products. However, there are four critical skills that PMs cannot do without – empathy, communication, listening, and organizing. If you would like to know what other skills PMs need to possess, you can check Top 20 Product Manager Skills.

How can you be a good Product Manager?

There are a number of ways you can become a good Product Manager. First, you have to have the right core competencies to do the job properly. Second, your aim should always be to deliver customer satisfaction with the product or service you launch. Lastly, you have to be a good leader and a good problem-solver.

What should a Product Manager do every day?

The typical day of a Product Manager consists mostly of meetings although there are no set daily activities that a PM does. No one day will be the same. We talk about this in our blog describing the typical day of a Product Manager. Although the daily tasks differ from industry to industry and product to product, the goal of delivering a quality product remains the same.

What’s the first thing you do as a new Product Manager?

As a new Product Manager, the first thing you do in your new company is to know the lay of the land. It’s rare that a PM starts from ground zero. You’re always going to pick up where the last Product Manager left off so you have to familiarize yourself with the processes and progress that has already been established.