In this Dear Melissa segment, Melissa answers subscribers’ questions about topics across the board- she covers the responsibilities of a Director and VP of Product Management, how to get in your product reps outside of work, her thoughts on sharing your roadmaps with your customer, and product managers vs project managers.
Show Notes
Q: Do Directors of Product Management pull out of the day-to-day and just manage the departments?
Q: How might a non-technical PM find or develop products outside of work?
Q: Should we make our roadmap public? What are the complications that may arise if we do?
Q: How do the roles of project and product managers differ? Where do you see the practical and pragmatic product management's response to value delivery when there are time and money constraints?
Resources Melissa Perri on LinkedIn | Twitter MelissaPerri.com
Episode Transcript
How might a non-technical product manager find or develop products to work on outside of work? So this one's definitely tricky. And again, you know, if you don't have a ton of time outside of work, because a lot of us have lives and families, it's gonna be a little challenging to do. But if you can figure out how to do this early on, especially maybe if you've got a little bit more free time on your hands, it can really help you make the leap into getting that product management role or practicing your skills.
So there's tons of low code options for things out there now. Like you can build websites, you can build, you know, MVPs, you can test a lot of things without having to be a developer, right? Without having to code yourself. So one, I would rely on a lot of those tools and look for low code or no code solutions to really go out there and try to test these things.
Hello, and welcome to an episode of Dear Melissa from the Product Thinking Podcast. The lines are now open and we're ready to answer your most pressing product questions.
Which prioritization framework would you recommend and why? Hi, Melissa, do you have any suggestions on developing a product strategy? What's the best way to implement a product strategy? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's a lot of questions. All right, let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dear Melissa.
Today we've got four great questions for you, all about different aspects of careers. So things about product design, working in different agencies, and even a hot topic about product management versus project management. So let's dive into those questions. First one up, Dear Melissa, I joined a startup about two and a half years ago.
I started as a front end developer, then grew into a role as a dual product manager slash senior product designer. Because as you know, in a startup, you wear multiple hats. I have the ability to choose either path, but I don't understand what a director or VP of product design does in regards to working with product managers and other directors.
Do directors of product design pull out of the day-to-day and just manage the departments? That is a great question. And I actually was also a product manager slash product designer, so I know a lot about this role. And I'm gonna answer it right after this. All right, we're back and we're talking about what does a director of product design or a VP of product design actually do? So when you get away from working in the day-to-days of a team and you become a manager, yes, you're gonna have to manage people, you're gonna have to develop them, you're gonna have to make sure they're on the right path and they're all set up for success.
So that's definitely a part of what the VPs of product design and the directors of product design do. But then also, there's still part of that trifecta team that we have of the tech leader, the product manager and the designer on the feature team. But you're just doing it now on the level of a director or the level of a VP.
So your VP of product, your VP of tech and you are still three people that are gonna be working together quite often. When you step into this role too, you have to think more about like, how do I enable my people for success? So that's stuff like bringing in design decisions and directions and like creating systems that allow people to do their work faster and really looking at like, here's the vision of where we're gonna go for this user experience and especially over the product that you have so people can take that direction and then go execute on it when they're working in their teams.
So things that VPs of product design do, they will set up things like better ways to get user research into the company. They will create things like design systems, which are basically libraries of all the elements that you have in your product, wherever it is, all the different buttons, all the fonts, all those things. They'll set up a team to do that and oversee it and make sure the design system's up to par.
They create the design direction and the user experience overall vision of what you want it to be across the product. They may be doing high-level concept testing with the VP of product management, helping to whip up different mock-ups and stuff to really get buy-in from the leadership team. So you're doing all of that, but you're not necessarily designing the features on a day-to-day basis, that's what your team is doing.
So when you think about it, it's like, how do I just enable my team to do their jobs better? How do I give them direction?
How do I set them up for success? How do I allow us to scale better? All those things is what you should be concentrating on when you get to be a director or VP, which is really a lot of what good VPs of product do and good VPs of tech do at those levels. They're providing direction, they're providing visions, they're giving overall guidance, but they're not really meddling in the day-to-day work.
That's what the teams are doing. All right, second question. Dear Melissa, in your episode with John Cutler, you talked about getting reps in for product skills. John mentioned, we have to build reps, no matter what environment we're in, even if you need to ship a product outside of work. You work in a place that ships products only every six months?
Release a product outside of work. How might a non-technical product manager find or develop products to work on outside of work? So this one's definitely tricky. And again, if you don't have a ton of time outside of work, because a lot of us have lives and families, it's gonna be a little challenging to do.
But if you can figure out how to do this early on, and especially maybe if you've got a little bit more free time on your hands, it can really help you make the leap into getting that product management role or practicing your skills.
So there's tons of low-code options for things out there now. Like you can build websites, you can build MVPs, you can test a lot of things without having to be a developer, right? Without having to code yourself. So one, I would rely on a lot of those tools and look for low-code or no-code solutions to really go out there and try to test these things.
I think the hard part though is coming up with the idea of what to test. Is there something that you're passionate about? Can you build yourself a product for yourself to make your life easier? Maybe something for your friends or family. Maybe you have a friend with a startup idea and you said, hey, let me help you test it.
Let me see if we could pull something together and just see if this works. Those are the places that I would start. I once hired a product manager who built himself this whole website on something that he was really passionate about. I don't remember what it was, but it was 10 years ago. It was his first product management job.
He was really passionate, didn't know what to do to show that he could do product management.
So he said, I'm gonna go through all the things that we typically learn about understanding your users and setting up personas and all that stuff. And I'm gonna build a website around that. I think he did it in whatever we had, like WordPress. Yeah, it was like a WordPress thing back then. But it just really showed that he can step through all those different pieces.
And I think that was really valuable for me to see when I was hiring him because it helped me understand how much I knew. But if you are trying to do, let's say this is not necessarily for a job. Let's say that this is, or to get your first job as a product manager, you've been doing this for a long time.
I would try to figure out like, what skills do you not get to practice in your current environment, right? Is it shipping things and iterating on it? Is it setting comprehensive strategies? And I would try to really look for that. But at the end of the day too, if you feel like you're not able to learn at the pace that you need to learn at your current job, it may be worth trying to find a faster paced place to go work for, so that you feel like you're practicing this more.
So that's something to look for as well. All right, next question. Dear Melissa, I recently transitioned into a lead PM role in a government agency. Discussions with the minister's office usually drive our priorities. And at time, there's an immense divergence between what our research suggests versus our priorities.
You know, the usual stuff. The interesting bit, our top stakeholders think they know best what customers want since they're in the public sphere most of the time. I'm wondering if making our roadmap public and having a broader feedback conversation with our users could be a good way to get some course correction.
Would be awesome to hear your thoughts on this. How could public product roadmaps go wrong? So I always advocate for bringing in your customers and your users to give more feedback, but I'm not sure if you want to just like make your roadmap public to achieve what you're trying to achieve. It sounds like one, you're trying to show them that they don't know everything about their customers.
I think making your roadmap public is one way to do that, but you have to make sure there's a feedback mechanism, right?
Like if you just put it up on the website and say, hey, it's now public, we'll be in here back, it's going to be really hard to get that feedback. It might also really be slow getting that feedback. So what are you trying to learn here? If you're trying to learn or trying to demonstrate that we don't know everything, I would say maybe start thinking about hypotheses that you want to test, going out there and doing good user research and then bringing those findings back, right?
Like play video clips of your users talking about how they really don't need that idea. Show the users the roadmap in the actual interviews, right? Like bring your roadmap, do a card sorting exercise, tell them to prioritize it. Ask if anything's missing. Really good way to show people that, hey, maybe we're not prioritizing the things that we think, you know, they're actually finding important, but we're only doing ones that we think are important.
That's really what I would look at for that. The one thing I don't like about just putting a public roadmap out there, yes, I do think you should make your roadmap public when you are certain that the things on there are gonna get shipped and they're the right things to ship.
If you don't know that though, it's gonna make that really hard. So if you don't know the things on your roadmap are the right things to build though, this is gonna make this incredibly hard. So that's where I get wary of public roadmaps, because if you have to backtrack from doing what you already promised, it's not gonna look good on you and then your customer is gonna lose trust on you.
So if you are sure, put the roadmap out there, have it be public, that's totally fine. If you're not sure, don't put the roadmap out there, but you can tell people, hey, this is what we're thinking in a controlled environment for user research, are we on the right path? Is this resonating with you or is there something else?
That's how I would really handle that. All right, last question. Dear Melissa, I'm a project manager where value delivery is dealt with in every project. We as project managers are brought in for a period of time like consultants on a time-bound and budget-restricted demand. From reading your book, I feel that project managers are up for the shallow tasks while product managers build value.
I do witness some collaboration between both PMs. That's funny. Well, yeah, we're both PMs, project managers, product managers. How do you see that? I am missing from your book the practical side of diving into value delivery when there are time and money constraints. Aside from the experimental steps, analysis of the data and prioritizing potential solutions which have to be tackled quickly and thoroughly, where do you see the practical and pragmatic product management's response?
All right, so let's start from the top. We got a lot of questions in here. So one, no, I don't think project managers do the shallow tasks. Like you need great project managers in companies and you need people with good project management skills. Like that is a part of product management. It's just not all the part of product management.
Where do we use project managers in organizations? It depends. If it is a waterfall-like project or a really big project that needs to get done, we will usually have a project manager working alongside the product manager, especially when it crosses into multiple teams.
At one company that I worked at, we had a lot of dependencies because it was one platform and we had like a whole integrations team on one spot, everybody was running the individual products. And usually if you made a change to one product, especially for larger things that we had to do, it might touch all across all these different teams that are run by all different VPs. So we'd have a project manager come on for those really large initiatives and help make sure everything was going smoothly.
That was a lot of work for them and it really made a difference. So that kept everybody on track. It told everybody like when to expect different things, when you had to hand off on it. Again, like really, really important that way. For your second question as well, how do we be pragmatic as product managers?
I don't think I've ever worked on a project that wasn't time and money constrained. Like everybody wants their things yesterday and they want it for as cheaply as possible. So I don't realistically think there's a lot of product managers out there working without those constraints.
So I'm not really sure where that came from. But everything that I wrote about in the book is usually there is some kind of money constraint and there is a time bound constraint. And the way that I would think about it is it's just not about like promising dates super far in advance for things that are super specific.
It's more about saying, hey, we're going to make these changes to these products and we need to get them out as quickly as possible. How do I work backwards and understand where that scope fits in for these different releases and like how we can actually work on that timing? So I think when product managers scope their work and start to think about roadmapping, we think about it as like, how do we get this out as fast as possible?
And then there's always these external pressures as well. Like if you are a B2B company and you do one big customer event every year and you got to show them what's flashy, like, yeah, you're going to need some stuff done by then. So that is a time constraint. How do we work backwards from that and figure out what we can prioritize, what can get done, what we can show our customers?
So I think we work within the bounds of budgets and time a lot. I think VPs of product are working with the money constraints, especially deeply. Like VPs of product are always managing their budgets. Same with chief product officers, always managing budgets, always trying to figure that out. But here's the thing, like when we start thinking about budgets as funding teams instead of funding projects, which is the big difference between our product management and our project management mindset, especially when it comes to budgeting, if we're funding teams, we've already got the budget.
So now it's just like, do that quickly, right? Like get it out there. But a chief product officer might be looking at it and saying, hey, if I actually do add another team to this initiative, can I get it done faster? If increasing the budget is gonna make it come out faster, does that end up in gained revenue?
Does that help us meet our time commitments? They should be doing that cost-benefit analysis.
And they do do this every day, I know for a fact, to see if it's worth it. So that's what you're doing as a leader. Now, product managers on teams are not usually working with a budget like that on a daily basis, because like they are the budget, right? Like this is the team, get it out as quickly as possible, but they're always working with time constraints.
I think we just, when we talk about it, we don't talk about projects though, we don't talk about products, let's put it this way, ending though, once we ship something, because then we go back and iterate. So it might feel like there's no time constraint if we're always iterating, but we do get to a point where it's like, okay, we reached our goal for now, let's move on to the next thing. And then we'll come back and iterate on this when we need to reach another goal.
So maybe that's where some of the confusion comes from, I think with the time and money constraints, but definitely plays a huge role in product management as well. And I think a great project manager is such a boon to a team.
For my company, we do a lot of video development. We have project manager who is helping us with that. It's life-changing, but it's a very like known, known step-by-step process, which is where I needed a great project manager to help do that across many different people. It's a little bit different than like working in a team and iterating or uncovering uncertainty when you do product development.
So just two different skill sets, both equally needed, but we just need to know when to need them in the right place and what's the appropriate things that they should be working on in a software development context. I think that's just where some of the struggle comes in between project management and product management, but very valuable skill sets for any team. And especially if you're dealing with dependencies, you definitely need a project manager to help you.
And it's made my life better as a product manager to have somebody on my team like that. So hopefully that clears that up for you. And you don't feel like you're not doing high value work because you are, you definitely are.
And you're helping with the value delivery too. You're ensuring that it gets out there. All right, so that's it for the Dear Melissa this week. Make sure you tune in next Wednesday to hear our next episode of Product Thinking Podcast. And again, if you have any questions for me, I do this every Wednesday, well, every other Wednesday, but I'm always looking at your questions, always picking out the ones that we want to answer.
So go to dearmelissa.com. We try to make it through every question that we get submitted unless I've answered it already. So always interesting to hear what's on your mind, you know, what's coming up for you. We'd love to answer your burning questions. We'll see you next time.
