Good product managers must be able to work cross-functionally across various stakeholders, may it be working with customers to collect the user requirements, writing detailed requirements and user stories for the engineering teams, building a demo for the sales team or providing pricing and other functional details to marketing to develop whitepapers, case studies or webinars for the prospective customers.
Customers will always provide a list of never ending “Must Have” features, which they need yesterday. To succeed as a product manager, one must be the intent “listener” to customer requirements and input to build a successful product.
After the customer, software engineering, architecture and UX are the next most important stakeholders for the product managers. Product managers must communicate feature requirements in the simplest of language with details to the development team to build a successful enterprise software application.
Following arekey to building a successful working partnership with the development team.
- Create a team culture i.e. “it’s we, not me”.
- Be patient. When things get rough (and they will) – be extra patient.
- Build trust. Make sure that development team knows that you are on their side.
- Always ask for the worst time estimates. Those are your best time estimates.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel. Always consider pros and cons of using a commercial tool to build connectors, security, payment or reporting modules.
- A good engineering leader, who owns the responsibility of feature delivery is worth her or his weight in gold, metaphorically.
The Stakeholders – Engineering, Architecture and UX
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