Today marks 30 days in my new role as an associate product manager at Trello, coming from the support team. I’m working on a cross-functional team, alongside an experience product manager, and one of the first things I did when I started was to set up a 15 minute chat with each of my new teammates. I spent a few minutes just chatting with each person, a few minutes talking about their experience on the team, and then, at the end, I asked each one what they found to be helpful in a product manager.
While none of these are probably going to be shocking to an experienced product manager, I found it really interesting to hear the role described by people who work alongside product managers but don’t hold that role themselves. Here’s how my teammates described an ideal product manager:
- Be responsive
- Know the status/history of everything
- “A lot of it is herding cats”
- Things will always take more time than you might think
- Knowing when to stand your ground and when to adjust (based on what’s not feasible)
- The more boundaries you can give, without giving exact step-by-step instructions, the better (“don’t give me a recipe, but give me the ingredients and a picture of what it should look like in the end”)
- Getting people to talk to each other, and not just about work
- Product management (strategy) doesn’t necessarily entail project management
- Be very organized
- Don’t be shy about voicing opinions
- Be innovative
- Breaking things down into manageable chunks
- Documenting everything
- Keeping people accountable; transparency
- Knowing what the scope of the project is, what the goals and features are, what the timeline is
- Empathy (you have to deal with people from totally different perspectives, have to bring them all together)
- Being a good listener
- It’s really important that the decisions that are being made are being communicated to everyone
- Take the strategy of the company and make that digestible for the team
- Right people kept in the loop at the right time, but not everyone in every single meeting
I particularly appreciate seeing empathy on this list, not least because it’s a familiar focal point for someone transitioning out of customer support.
If you’ve ever worked as or with a product manager, what would you contribute to this list?
Caity Thinks 