Erin Nardo’s Post

One of the main responsibilities of a product manager is to make decisions. Some decisions will define their product success, but not all. What are different types of decisions and how should you approach them? #productmanagement #productdecisions https://lnkd.in/eQDe3arR

I do not entirely agree with the notion that, in reference to Product Managers, "there is one person that should be responsible for delighting customers that clearly is not expected to do so anymore". Of course as PMs we are meant to be 'the voice of the customer', but we are not solely responsible for delighting them. Delighting the customers with an ideal user experience is something that comes from building a customer-first culture in your extended Product team (PMs, Designers, Engineers, and Business Stakeholders). I think it is a core competency of a PM to be the voice in the room that is asking "How does building/ fixing/ changing 'X' help our users and produce revenue?" to establish urgency and priority for a given task. However, it is more so on the PM to help build a culture where it is a team responsibility to delight the customer, and not just the responsibility of one person. When the customer's experience becomes the duty of one person and not the whole team it is a failure of the team as whole. But, when the team of product managers, designers, engineers and stakeholders all accept that responsibility together the resulting product will be a triumph for the customer. #productmanagement #customerexperience

🚀 Simplifying Product Management: A Quick Dive Hey everyone! Today, let's break down what being a Product Manager (PM) is all about, but let's keep it super simple. 🌟 Imagine you have a puzzle, but not just any puzzle - it's the puzzle of creating something that people love and use. As a PM, your job is to see the big picture before the puzzle is solved. You're the one making sure all the pieces fit together perfectly. 🧩 Here's how we do it: 1. Listening: First, we listen. We listen to what people need, what frustrates them, and what could make their lives better. It’s like being a detective, but instead of solving mysteries, we solve problems. 2. Planning: Then, we plan. We take all those needs and ideas and sketch out a plan. It’s a bit like drawing a map before you start a journey. This map guides everyone from where we are to where we need to be. 3. Teaming Up: We can’t do it alone. We work with awesome folks like designers who make things look good, engineers who build it, and marketers who tell the world about it. It’s like being the captain of a ship, making sure everyone is sailing in the right direction. 4. Learning and Tweaking: Once our creation is out in the world, we watch and learn. What do people love? What could be better? Then, we tweak it. It’s like refining a recipe until it’s just right. In essence, being a PM is about dreaming up the stuff that makes people’s lives a bit easier, more enjoyable, or simply better, and then working with a team to make that dream a reality. It's challenging, thrilling, and, honestly, a bit of a rollercoaster. 🎢 If you’re curious about making things people love or just fascinated by how products come to life, product management might just be your calling. #productmanagement #Innovation

Here’s the second post on my Adventures in Product Management series. This one’s about Personas, where we come up with some fun Personas for Football Boots. Heading to my Medium profile, will help you find some more articles in the series! https://lnkd.in/eN4pMnfh

Interesting ways to frame saying no to a feature or request. I'll be testing some of these! My product management toolkit (20): the art of saying “no”

I'll be talking product management on my substack - subscribe to get a weekly post on various digital product management topics... today's post is all about the Themes of Product Management. https://lnkd.in/gKbZyvaU

Hey folks! ⭐️ I need your suggestions & and input in addressing the Classic conundrum Situation for Product Managers. Let's discuss 🤔 Imagine you are a PM for a popular e-commerce, and you're tasked with improving the overall user experience. Your team has identified two critical features that could significantly enhance the platform, but due to resource constraints, you can only prioritize one at a time. 💡Option 1: Enhanced Search Functionality Implementing this option would involve upgrading the search algorithm, integrating advanced filters, and improving search result relevance. Users would be able to find products more quickly and accurately, potentially increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction. However, this would require a substantial investment in development resources and could delay other ongoing projects. → Click the ❤️ for Option 1 💡 Option 2: Seamless Checkout Process Alternatively, you could focus on streamlining the checkout process. This involves optimizing the payment gateway, reducing steps in the checkout flow, and enhancing the overall payment experience. The goal is to decrease cart abandonment rates, boost transaction completion, and improve the end-to-end user journey. This option would also require a significant allocation of resources and might impact the timeline for other product enhancements. → Tap that 👍 for Option Now, here's the twist – due to resource constraints, you can only prioritize ONE. 😱 Both options have the potential to significantly impact user satisfaction and drive business growth, but you can only prioritize one due to resource constraints. 👉 What would YOU choose? 👉 How do you decide which option to pursue first, and how do you justify your decision to stakeholders who might see the value in both enhancements? Tag your PM friends, drop your thoughts below, and let's navigate this conundrum together! #productmanagement #decisionmaking #productmanager

Role of a Product Manager & MMM We all have read many posts, articles, blogs that explain the role of a Product Manager. We read that a PM is the CEO for that product. (So satisfying to listen to all such things ! ). PM is at the center of Design, Technology, and Business.  (Again, you feel you are the master of the universe) There are many more ways to describe the roles of a PM;  all are great to hear and quite moral boosting and sometimes daunting. Here is one more way to describe it. PM’s role is essentially to ensure MMM. (i.e. Make More Mony) PM has the responsibility that his/her product makes more money. One may ask, more than what? Well, that is contextual. If it is early-stage product, then it makes more money than what has been spent on it. That is to say, it reaches break-even as early as possible and starts showing +ve. If it is a well-established product, then it makes more money than last year. Depending upon the situation one may have the ambition to say it makes more money than the competitors. Needless to say, the horizon to achieve MMM is always decided by the Org. And it is driven by the market sector, type of business, the runway you have, etc. But irrespective of the product and the business, the responsibility a PM’s role is invariably MMM.   Having a cool glitzy UI, product stickiness, frictionless onboarding, topnotch Tech Stack, great ability to handle concurrency, yadda yadda yadda, are all important. Very important. But they are not the end objective. They are the vehicles to reach the end objective. The end objective is MMM. And PM is responsible for that. As a PM, I must be conscious that the backlog refinement I do, the Stories I slice, the features I ship, the Help Doc I right, the customer survey I carry out, the patents we file, the meetings I have, the feature requests I accept, the feature requests I decline, and anything else should take me a step closer the end objective. Which is MMM.

99% of product managers are always asking this question - how much tech I need to know? They treat tech as a bunch of topics to be mastered. They read, they fret and they give up, just happy to write vague user stories and figuring out UI. Here is the secret - Appreciation of tech is not about mastering a bunch of topics, it is about mastering the builder’s mindset. At its core it is - A. Given a large unstructured problem how do you break it down and build a product B. Training your mind to think of products as a bunch of objects/systems which interact with each other in a very specific manner Only once you get these core philosophies you will be able to understand the product building process. Unclear? Let’s say you are product manager for a parking lot management software and let’s say this is a 0-1 launch (it is quite a popular question) 99% of the product managers wouldn’t write their PRDs in a cohesive manner because they don’t have a good mental map of how products are built. Your job is not only to think of good user features that will sell the product but also make sure that you are covering important requirements clearly that will have a large impact on how product will be built. Missing these might mean chaos in future. Let me cover a few - 1. If you want your parking lot management product to scale for multi-level parking vs single level parking 2. If you want your parking management product to work for different kinds of parking spots - eg. bikes, compact cars, SUVs 3. If you want your parking management product to be able to apply different kinds of pricing (hourly vs block pricing, uniform vs differential pricing) and be able to change the pricing on the fly. 4. If you want your parking management product to be apply some operational strategies eg. allocate an open parking spot which is closest to entry Now some of these might be clear functional/user requirements whereas some of them may not be functional requirements but flexibility to cater to the future clients. This is exactly how you need to train your brain - to think of products as systems and then think about what kind of non functional/non obvious product requirements are imp. If you miss these you will find later that your product doesn’t work well for a lot of customers. It is not just enough to write vague user stories and hand it over to your engineers for them to figure it out all by themselves. Remember your job is to understand the customer landscape and use cases with some view to the future. Follow me for high quality content https://lnkd.in/gHweK_q7 AND https://lnkd.in/ggUKftFq ***Also grab my product assignments playbook now updated with 16 real product cases and solutions, all successful submissions, real job offers, 234 pages of content. 100% success rate, 150 buyers already! grab it here - **Grab it now** - https://lnkd.in/gHzyN-Xc #productmanagement #tech #career

Whether you're a seasoned product manager or just starting out, adopting these 36 Best Practices for Successful Product Management can set you on the path to creating products that resonate with users and drive business growth.