 Hello everyone. Glad to see you all here. Welcome. My name is Georgie. I work at Lava and today I wanted to present a topic of why PMs sometimes don't manage products. I tried to understand the reasons lying in the bottom of it and to provide some ideas on how to overcome this and become a more successful product manager. I will plan my speech as follows. I will start with making sure that we are all aligned about product managers responsibilities, the skills required, and the teams that you will be working with. Then I will apply common misinterpretations of the product manager responsibilities and how they hinder your progress. Also, it might end most frequently results in you not being able to manage product properly. Finally, I will have a few ideas on how to avoid all these caveats and progress in product management and not be burnout and keep yourself motivated. I hope some of those will be useful for you and let's start. Who is the product manager? I formulated it as follows. Product manager is a person whose care responsibility is to deliver value to the customer. While delivering the value to the customer, you have to use limited resource of technology and products that you have and also comply with all the business constraints that exist such as budget limitations, legal obligations that you have in a certain country to operate, and any others. In the end, your goal is to make sure that the customer hires your product to serve their needs. This requires quite a broad spectrum of knowledge, which is why you will also be working super closely with a cross-functional product team. It is usually a team that consists of engineers, engineering leaders, such as a product engineering manager. You will also be working closely with product analysts, product designer, user research experts, data scientists, and sometimes QA. Not all of those functions exist in all the companies. It depends on the size of those or the particular subject area the company works in. But those are the most typical functions of the product and engineering teams that you will be working with. On the non-product and non-engineering side of the company, there are stakeholders of all kinds. Marketing, who will make sure that your product gets distributed to end customers. Finance, who are responsible for automating cash flows, making PNL a reliable report, and all other kinds of financial operations. Legal, who make sure that you comply with all the regulations needed. And finally, customer support, who are helping your customers overcome any challenges that happen when they are trying to use their new product. There might be a wide variety of stakeholders, also depending on the industry that the company operates in. But the exact list doesn't matter. The point is, there are external stakeholders that you will be working with. And they are the source of the business constraints for you. In the end, as a product manager, you work in between the following quadrants. You work to deliver value to the end customers using the limited resource of product team that you have and also getting to comply and respect the business constraints that exist for your company to keep operating. This requires quite a wide variety of knowledge. And most oftenly, when you start as a new joiner PM, you need to learn new stuff, regardless of what were your previous experiences and what is your background, what is your education, etc. As a PM, you're really in between of lots of functions and you need to work with them quite efficiently. So why sometimes it is hard to manage products and why we cannot focus on it well enough. There are, as I mentioned before, being a product manager is no easy. And this issue is most more typical for entry-level PMs, but it also exists in the future. So I try to figure out the main reasons behind not being able to manage products and provide some reasons why that happens. First of all, you might be doing someone else's job. As a PM who works between non-product business counterparties, together with a lot of functions of products to serve the needs of the customer, you are required to know a piece of everything. And even before you stepped in as a PM, there already in most of the cases was some kind of a product in the company. There were already other product managers, there were already business stakeholders, and there were already customers in this company. So before you stepped in, the product function was done by someone else. In most of the cases, it is not a single particular person who was feeling this gap, but these functions were scattered across different people all around the company. For example, marketing does the customer research, runs the surveys, runs focus groups, etc. Then products require like feature requirements are formulated by external stakeholders, product team in the end gets to design the interface and develop a feature, so to ship it to the customer. When you step in, there are always people who already work with a given product and already know better what is happening to the customers and how the company works, which is why it requires some time for you to fill in the gaps of your knowledge and become a fully self-sustainable product manager. But sometimes due to lack of experience or maybe due to not being expected by others to fill in all those functions, you might end up just working with the requirements of senior management or non-product counterparts. In the end, you might end up just shipping features and organizing the work of the product team. This happens most commonly because being a product manager requires a lot of communication, a lot of execution, making sure that features get delivered in the reasonable quality, in the reasonable time frames, and the delivery pipeline is sequenced properly. In this landscape, it is easy to forget about getting to know the business, getting to know the customer, and you might end up working as a project manager. Another important caveat is that it is quite an easy thing to have an opinion about the product, and especially if someone else is more experienced in working with a given company than you. There are always competitors whom you can compare your product to. You can get ideas of the features from the competitors, from the competitors, or from the other mobile apps, from the other industries, etc. But it is not necessarily what your customers need. This is an important thing to bear in mind as a PM. Sometimes, you might not be expected to deliver value as a project manager, but rather as a project manager. Moving on, the next reason of us not being fully focused on the role of being a product manager is the other way around. We might be, in turn, doing someone else's job. When a product manager is not expected or empowered to build value, get to change the business to help you to create this value for the customer, and being a source of this drive for value, you might end up filling in someone else's gaps. Most typically, you start being a project manager, but in addition, if your team is not well equipped with some other function, you might also be required to fill this in. For example, if you don't have a designer on your team, you might end up building sketches of the interface for your development team. Or if you are not equipped enough with an engineering capacity, some of your features might not have an admin panel, for example. You will be orchestrating all kinds of configurations and feature toggles to configure your product for different markets or different cities, etc. You might end up doing some operational job or doing the job of some other person in the cross-functional product team. Don't get me wrong. It is important for a product manager to know how all those things are done and know how the design works, how to cut the scope of the project and do an NMVD, how to run simple SQL queries to retrieve some basic metrics. But it is not good if you're constantly filling in someone else's job because you may get distracted from focusing on delivering value for the customer. The next reason is us being obsessed by redesigns and A.B. testing different configurations of the user interface. This sometimes happens when you are quite well-equipped by designers, analysts, and your internal A.B. test platform is quite automated and mature so that you can run a lot of experiments. Sometimes it is an important thing to do, but it is only valuable when you keep your customer's feedback in mind, and with every A.B. test, you're moving towards solving the bigger issue that your customer has. Otherwise, and more frequently than not, some teams run A.B. tests just because they can, and this ends up being brute-forcing your way towards certain metric optimization. It might be a good idea and a very optimizational task for a huge company that is already super successful and where increasing your metric by 0.1% returns a lot of revenues or users or other important stuff to your company. For example, if you're working on the Google search page, you probably will get huge success if you increase conversion to advertisement clicks by one percentage point, but it's not the case for all the companies working with products. It is important to bear in mind and challenge yourself. Are you running all those A.B. tests and doing all those minor tweaks in the user interface just because it is harder to do other stuff or just because you can? You need to be absolutely sure that whatever you do is the most valuable thing for the customers. It is also important that if it's harder to make the business counterparties collaborate with you to solve heavy and complex issues, you might also end up just doing whatever is in your area of responsibilities and influence. This is a caveat that you need also to be aware of. Last but not least, sometimes your team's success and your own success is not measured in the value that customers get. The most common misconception that happens here is that when a new donor PM steps in, their success is mostly measured by the throughput of the team, the number of initiatives delivered, and the general happiness of the people that PM works with, which usually comes with the transparency of the backlog, making sure that people get what they want, and other very operational and executional stuff. If your team's success is measured by the throughput of the team, this is a red flag for you that you might not be doing product management properly, or maybe you are not expected to do it that way. So there are quite a few reasons, and it's quite easy to end up not managing product or not working in a fully focused and fully empowered product management way. But what can we do about it? I have a few ideas and hopefully some of those might be helpful for you. First of all, since you are always expected to relieve the burden of execution, you need to really excel at it. As you step in, the very fast and the very important thing that you need to do is to gain trust of your stakeholders and your own team by improving the processes, improving trust within the team, and shipping the project in a predictable manner with an impeccable quality so that the customers are happy, there is less firefighting and more controlled and structured execution. So you as a product manager need to apply your technical design and analytical knowledge to speed up the delivery process, find places where you can cut corners without substantially reducing value for end customer, and basically you need to optimize and do project management at a very high quality. Next up, you need to make sure that your team delivers an output that is measurable and that plugs into the broader company product strategy. It is important that your success is measured in real world values and it is tied to a certain metric that can be objectively measured. Another important thing is that some metrics can be good or bad and they can be either sustainable for just a product team or for a product team and some other teams within the company. For example, if an output metric is number of customers acquired per month, it might not only depend on products, but it doesn't mean that the metric is bad per se. It means that you need to be super closely aligned on your execution and roadmap with your marketing counterparts who work on promoting your product for new customers. Your roadmaps need to be aligned. The goals that you need to achieve need to be aligned and you both need to know each other's domains quite well. Which brings me to my next point. As a PM, you really need to understand the business that your company is operating in. And it starts from the basics. How does the value create value and how does it earn money? The very basic unit economics of your company is a must for a product manager to know. Another important thing that I mentioned with the previous proposal is that when your output depends on non-products, the function of the company, you really need to understand all the aspects of working with this business team. What is their business context and what are their limitations? If you are working, for example, on the admin tool for customer support, you get to know how much does the company pay for the service of a customer support agent. What is their motivation? How much does the rent of the call center cost, et cetera? And the other way around. Your stakeholders really need to understand your product and you really need to understand the business aspect of what you're working on with your stakeholders. Finally, the probably the most important and the most unique thing that product manager has to have is the knowledge of the customer, which is why you always need to keep talking to them. And this, I mean, literally, not only running surveys and reading the script or watching recordings of certain user interviews, also talking yourself to the customer if you have such an opportunity or if you don't have it, you might need to create one. So another important thing while talking to the customers is that you never have to disregard what they have to say. The biggest value the PM contributes to is synthesizing customer feedback and technological capabilities and the business constraints into the product customer value. So even if the customer complains about the prices of your product, which you cannot change overnight, you really need to bear it in mind and make sure that you deliver as much value as for as low price so that the value time value over price ratio is as high as possible for the customer. For example, if you're working on a streaming service and the customers don't like the fact that you don't have some titles on your streaming, it doesn't obligatorily mean that you need to forget it. You shouldn't. You should bear in mind that the variety of content is very important for your customer. And then you need to transform this feedback into the ways to solve the issues with the technology and also to understand if it's feasible by the means of execution or operational excellence that your company can deliver or not. I'm sorry. So yeah, here are some of the ideas and I wanted to summarize all of them with just one point. As a product manager, you're required to know a wider idea of things, which means that you have to constantly keep learning. So the better you understand the business limitations and the way the business is run by you and the competitors and in other industries, the better you understand your customer's mindset and which role your product plays in their lives, the better it is for you to synthesize the actual technical and product solutions that will cost, that will bring value to the customer's lives. So it means that regardless of how much you already know, the most important thing that you need to focus your attention on is what you don't know yet. So push your boundaries of the comfort zone, get to know how the products work, how business works, how customer thinks, and those unknowns are what brings innovation. So good luck. Thank you all for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments and goodbye.