Post Covid-19 “no-brainer”? Strengthen your digital pm leadership skills NOW :-)

As companies (finally!) realize that unfulfilled users needs are evolving quickly through IoT, digitalization and new internet of behaviors, digital product manager is essential to shape companies of tomorrow. The pandemic is an accelerating factor by throwing us in a new level of ambiguity and uncertainty about the future.

With 15 years of product management and global business development under my belt, I want to reflect on some takeaways inspired by some of my own challenges during the ambiguous times the pandemic brought to us.

First let’s define for good what is a Digital Product Manager? Everywhere except a few places in the world (Seattle, Bangalore, SF, hear your names), a Digital Product Manager is a fairly new profession to accelerate the digital transformation of organizations and prioritize uses ahead of the product.

Concretely, the digital product manager is responsible, as his name suggests, for a digital product (an app, a site, software, etc.). Like a ‘Top Chef’ – excuse my French mister Etchebest – , he is at the intersection of business, technology and user experience. He guides the digital transformation of the company by breaking the silos that exist between marketing, IT management and the business lines.

What are the characteristics of this new profession that become critical as we all went working from home with blurred lines of influences across trans? One of the main ways of working of the digital product manager is through Agile methodologies probe to iterative development, that is to say a form of development where, to respond to a problem, a customer need, we quickly create a prototype of the digital product (a mobile application or PWA for example) to submit it to users.

Their feedback allows the development of a more extensive prototype, until reaching the final application. However during the pandemic, many pms still tend to turn their digital products to their users too late. This way of doing things involves a different relationship to time from that of the traditional product manager.

Having been a pm both for luxury physical products or premium coffee and now for GAFA, my experience is that there is very few common ground between the two. It always make me smile to see traditional physical pm calling out that they are ‘digital strategist’. I respectfully disagree that you can dive into driving end-to-end digital development without previous experiences and solid ramp-up. Curiosity and good will are not enough. You truly need to roll up your sleeves and dive deep into it, to get the job done.

Unlike a project that has a beginning and an end, a digital product never stops, and need to be planned with a strong vision over time. As a leading pm, your job is to be building capacities in the process of permanent improvement. From ideation to shipping version 1 or iterating new functionalities for a legacy product, there is never a dull moment for a digital senior pm.

My top 4 takeaways for all new tech digital pm leading agile methodologies across teams:

• Perfect your art of communicating: not only to your boss, but to all your stakeholders (yes, even this vague team who gave you insights into edge cases for your requirements). There are so many blind corners when developing a product. Do your homework to get all your product stakeholders lined up, and speak loud. OVER-Communication is your new BFF: newsletter, status update, QBR, MBR, WBR, 3YP, Sims, Wikis
• - Go fiercely about prioritizing the work: learn to push back as not everything is urgent (I promise you it is not) and do give a voice to everyone. As the pandemic forced me and my teams to be 100% remote, I had to stretch my ability to answer to countless asks, pings on chime or emails. This drove me crazy. Take a step back, build your prioritization framework and over communicate it to calm down every good intent (back to takeaway #1)
• - Global by default is no longer a ‘nice to have’: product leaders produce product plans. But in COVID-19 era, pms fear for failure (or lack of executive sponsorships due to ambiguous times). Therefore, I have seen several conservative plans lacking vision and tech insights on how and why things should not be designed on a global scale from day-1.
• - Ship-Ship-Ship- and do it. fast: your job as a pm lead is to make a positive impact on your customers’ lives. Being at Amazon for close to 9 years now, I always feel pressured but energized to the company daily motto to « ship, ship, ship ». However in COVID-19 era, I found myself drowning and spending a disproportional portion of my time on things that may not result in direct customer value. Focusing on continuous improvement and not letting ‘the tail wag the dog’ of what you should do for your actual products has been a big pitfall for me – such as focusing on helping others pms’ features or other cross customer-benefitting improvements that may never see the light of day. Lesson learned: if I am spending more of 20% of my time on things that will not benefit my product’s customers, means that I’m doing something wrong and need to course-correct quickly.

Hope my learnings will benefit some of you.

I look forward to new learnings and challenges – as we all move to a new normal.

Meanwhile, if you are a digital PM (or not) – where do you work and what are your biggest product management learnings during the pandemic?