Product Management

I became a product manager around 2015 while working at Figure.NZ. Being part of the team here taught me so much about how to build, maintain and improve products on a tight budget, with some huge unknowns and very little time.

Some of my biggest learnings are based on some simple concepts, these include:

You don’t have to know all the answers, but utilise the skills and experience around you to find a solution - basically, work as a team to achieve the objective.
Listen. Really listen to what your team are saying to you, what is hard and why it is hard to them THEN ask all of the questions and listen to those responses.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should (classic Jurassic Park reference that is sooo important). An example is around adding more and more features to a product because they are new and exciting, instead of working on making your product more reliable and consistent.
Understand the core of what you are wanting to achieve. This makes you more flexible in what you build and also makes it easier to let go of outdated products.
Start small, start simple (even when you want to create the 72 tool Swiss army chainsaw). Test out with who will be using your products and build from there.

Process is important

Setting up and maintaining a process for product development can make a huge difference on how productive your team is and how successful your products are. I favour an agile approach using a Kanban style board for managing products. My buzzwords here are iteration, minimal viable product (MVP) and communication, when I talk about my management process.

In a TL:DR nutshell:

Include learning as part of your process. Retrospectives after a big project can be valuable, but what can make the difference is making space to regularly and briefly review and evaluate your products at whatever stage they are in. After testing a change - what do you know now? What is still unknown? How do you customers/users respond?
Have clear goals and values, OR be clear about the organisation’s goals and values. This will guide the process you set for your team and the products you build and let you know what you need to prioritise or what is success.
What ever type of product management platform you use to organise yourselves and track progress, be it JIRA, Github, Trello or Asana etc, just make sure everyone knows the rules! Who owns the board/process? Who can submit ideas and how are they managed? Set clear and simple rules that anyone can follow, and ensure there is a system that means people can escalate, notify, and just generally communicate to each other.
You should be able to review your product board and quickly assess the state of each task/project.

I wrote in detail about how we set up Figure.NZ’s process for product development here if you want some more information! (note this was specific to the org and not one size fits all)

Previous work

I started out by doing a lot of testing, debugging, marketing and administrating products from a range of different NZ tech startups from 2011. Initially iPhone and Android apps, CMS and online ecommerce stores. Also I have spent considerable time in customer acquisition and building client relationships, taking what I learnt in customer service, my BA in Psychology, and applying it to IT Support for POS software company Vend Ltd, and converting sales for a large retail group in an online environment.

Projects that i’m particularly proud of being part of are: