How To Train a Product Manager

Over the last month I’ve found a delicious new recipe for continuous learning – popcorn and pints! Each week a couple Product Owners and I get together for 30-60 minutes to watch product videos and discuss. We’ve started by checking out the Mind the Product video archive. It’s been a fantastic way to stress forever learning, have a chance to learn from some of the industry’s best, and bond as a Product Owner group.

If you want to try it out yourself, here’s some tips:

• If you don’t have beer on tap at work, just call it ‘Product & Popcorn’
• Schedule it for a regular time. We do Tuesdays from 3-4pm (that way folks can leave early or talk to their Team afterwards before the end of the day)
• Get a variety of fun popcorns! I’ve had the best luck with Trader Joe’s popcorns which are all great and unusual. We rotate who buys the popcorn each week.
• Have each person pick a drinking word before the video starts.
• Take frequent breaks to discuss/laugh/cry about what you’re hearing.

Hopefully you and your Product team learn a lot from Popcorn & Pints. I hope to be sharing some of the best videos and thoughts here soon. If you have any suggestions for great places for Product Management videos, please let me know in the comments.

There’s always so much to test. From business models to user experiences, getting feedback early and often leads to the best designs. When you’re onboarding a new PM, you’ll surely have something that can be tested, and hallway testing is not only a way to test cheaply but also a fantastic way to have your new PM meet the organization. Hallway testing is doing quick tests, mainly for user experience designs, with your co-workers in the hall or at their desks. I love to use it for lightweight decisions, such as button placement or text. I’ll walk around with some screens, either digitally or on paper, going up to co-workers who seem to have a moment to get their feedback.

For a new PM, this is also a perfect way to start meeting others in the organization. It’s a great excuse to go say hi and have a productive conversation. They can also learn a lot about what others do by asking them about the application they have open on their computer. The co-workers also love getting to be a part of the design process, and get a peek at upcoming product ideas.

Recently I tried a new trick to make hallway testing even sweeter – candy! I bought two bags of candy, one milk chocolate and one dark chocolate, and began each test like this:

Me: Hi, I’m William, Product Manager for Team X, and if you have 5 minutes I’d love to get your feedback on some future product designs. Can I ask you a couple questions?

Tester: Sure!

Me: Awesome! First question, do you prefer milk or dark chocolate? Why?

Tester: Milk chocolate because I hate the bitter taste…

This opening has several benefits. First, the unexpected chocolate question gets them surprised and excited, and helps transition them from whatever they had been doing to the test with an open mind. Second, it gets them talking, especially with the question of ‘why’. It warms them up to think critically and answer ‘why’ a lot. Lastly, I get to give them candy after they answer, which not only gets a smile but makes the session fun. Especially for a new PM, these hallway testers will be sure to remember the PM who came and gave them surprise candy, and gets the PM off on the right foot.

Every customer call, no matter how mundane, can be a powerful opportunity to reconnect yourself and your development team to your customer. Outside of research calls where we get to show exciting new products, there can be many customer calls for things like hearing feedback from a frustrated customer to assisting with a tough sale. The bias may be to treat these as functional meetings, with the goal to end the call with as few action items as possible and get back to work. However, even though these calls aren’t exciting research calls, they still have a lot of value. By using some tricks to make exciting notes from these calls, we can make the call more informative and virtually bring the customer back with us to share with stakeholders and our Team. For a new Product Manager learning to take engaging notes is an important skill, and hopefully these techniques make it easier. Taking enhanced notes like this leads to a great first impression as well, especially if your development team typically has little customer interaction.

First, make your notes pop with visual elements. I like to include two main ones. First, if you’re a B2B product, grab a copy of the customer’s company’s logo off Google and include it at the top of the notes. This helps you and your Team remember that you’re working with real brands, and it’s very exciting when the logo is well-known. The second image I include is the customer’s face from LinkedIn. By inserting their profile picture, you reinforce that your customers are real people. It especially makes it more engaging for your Team or stakeholders who read your notes, and is an easy and unexpected addition. It seems like magic to them when you somehow got the customer’s picture from a phone call.

For the notes, they can be simple, but focus on a couple aspects. First, record any action items, to ensure you don’t forget to do any follow-up. The second is to capture the customer emotion and feedback. I like to be profuse in my note-taking, and later go back and highlight a couple items in particular that either have actionable feedback or are particularly powerful statements. Like an executive summary, they’re the two or three things I’d want my Team to read. It may be an emotional statement about the product, or a neat idea, or a workaround they’ve come up with. I look for items that will spark creativity in the Team and inspire compassion for the customer.

Be sure to save your notes in a searchable place. Google Drive is great, and you can make a folder that’s shared with your whole Team. I also like to put the date and customer name in the file name to identify them later. Be sure to notify the Team of the new notes too, as they will rarely proactively check Google Drive.

If you’re training a Product Manager or may be in the future, these notes will be a great resource for building their customer empathy and for reference when talking about why a feature was built.

I’ve been doing some research on performance testing, and found the excellent blog Web Performance Today. In particular, the post “You are the worst judge of your site’s performance. Here’s why.” was a great read. Product Managers are biased in judging performance, for the reasons explained in the article:

1. We have great tools, like Mac computers and the newest iPhones, that do better with poor product performance.
2. We’re too sympathetic to what it takes to make a fast site, and are willing to accept slow performance as we know how hard it is to make it fast.
3. We know how to work around slow performance by refreshing sites, closing other browser tabs, blocking ads, and other tricks.

Given the unsettling bias in our own judgement, there are ways to gain empathy and awareness of slow performance. With a new Product Manager, first it is important to make them aware of their bias. As users, we’re a small segment for most of our products, being early adopters and lovers of technology. We’re not the majority that will make our products cross the chasm. We must avoid letting personal bias substitute real user experience and feedback in our judgement of performance.

To help avoid our bias, here are some tricks to get a truer feel for your site’s performance:

1. Use a bad laptop for a day. Most Product Managers I’ve worked with use the latest Macs, which do a great job with websites and apps. Instead, leave your laptop at home one day, and get a loaner laptop from IT. You’ll likely get a PC several years old; the same type of PC your users have, that you can use to try your product.
2. Use a VM to access older browsers. Your dev team is likely already using VMs, and they or your IT team may be able to create an older Windows instance for you to use. It should have older IE, with the default privacy/performance settings, to give you a great taste for how the site feels. VMs typically also have bare-bones specs, or you can ask your team to make it lean by not provisioning many resources. If you’re feeling daring, you could even demo off the VM.
3. Use a slow connection. Go to a Starbucks, library, or public Wifi to avoid the speed from your work and home’s network. You may even be able to join one from your office depending on if you’re located next to stores.
4. Don’t multitask. Use your product, and don’t let yourself get distracted or look away while it loads. On one product I owned, a joke got started to sing “Loading Loading Loading” to the tune of Rawhide’s theme song whenever the loading spinner was shown. If you make yourself think or sing an annoying song while your product loads, you’ll feel the pain.

Of course, you should also have performance tracking and monitoring on your site, (Web Performance Today can tell you a lot more), but I’ve found numbers don’t make you really feel the pain. By making yourself see what it’s like for your customers, you gain empathy and remove your bias.

Sleep is extremely important, yet often not given the time it deserves. I’m often surprised when I talk to Product Managers about how little sleep they’re getting. The rule of thumb I like to use for a day is “8 hours for work, 8 hours for play, and 8 hours for sleep.” If you want to do more in any of these categories, you have to take time from one of the others. And yes, commuting to/from work is part of the 8 hours for play.

When mentoring a new Product Manager, it’s important to talk about sleep. Find out how much they’re getting, and if it’s less than 8 hours, ask if it’s due to work. Asking about sleep shows that you care about their health and well-being, and questions some of the common stereotypes that sleep must be sacrificed to be successful. If it does turn out that sleep is being lost due to too much work, it may be worth talking about how to say “no” more often to work requests and deprioritize tasks of little value.

If you’re not getting enough sleep, try getting at least 8 hours for a week and see how you feel. Be careful that you may feel great after one or two nights, and be tempted to get little sleep on the third night. Stick with the 8 hours for a week, and note how your health, energy, motivation, and creativity improve. If you think there’s no way you could try such an experiment, do an assessment of your work tasks, and stop doing the least important items. You’ll be surprised about how you’ll get creative about delegation and delay to make it happen, leading to better energy to focus on those items that are the most important on your list.

If you’d like to read about the origins of the 8/8/8 rule of thumb I use and where the 8-hour workday comes from, as well as why rest is so important, check out “The Origins of the 8 Hour Workday and Why We Should Rethink It.” It may also inspire a different experiment you want to run for approaching your days.