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Tag: product managers

  • How Product Managers Can Take Back Control with Feature Flags

    How Product Managers Can Take Back Control with Feature Flags

    Product managers live in a high-speed world and are always focused on releasing the most impactful features in the shortest amount of time. Since users have grown accustomed to regular UI updates and bug fixes completed in near real time, this frenetic pace at which product managers work will only increase.

    The process of pushing out new features or software fixes can be very stressful on product managers, and the one thing they crave to keep their sanity and ensure a successful release is control. Luckily, that’s exactly what feature flags provide.

    Dialing Up Feature Flags

    At their core, feature flags give development teams the ability to turn features on and off without deploying new code. Think of them as dials in the cloud. When the dial is attached to any feature in a product–whether a new one or an old one–it controls who sees it, who has access to it and how quickly it is delivered to an entire customer base.

    Feature flags let organizations break the tyranny of the Thursday night release by segmenting it into smaller bits to control exposure and enable a continuous release motion. You might start by turning on a feature to only internal users or beta testers so you can test in production to make sure nothing has been missed. From there, you have the freedom to ramp up the feature to your customers gradually before going to 100% availability.

    With this controlled exposure, development teams can lessen the panic and anxiety around the weekly release schedule. Having the ability to completely turn off features means feature flags also increase application stability and remove the need for hotfixes. It’s less often necessary to assemble a war room if there is a problem when you can simply turn off the feature in seconds. By working feature flags into the release process, teams take control of the who, what and when in terms of releases. They can also dictate types of users, demographics, locations and scale the release of the new feature.

    Feature Flags and Product Managers

    Outside of the DevOps team, feature flags can also be really powerful for product managers. Historically, the release of a new feature meant product managers had to coordinate with cross-functional teams to ensure the release was executed successfully. This meant making sure marketing was ready to publish a blog post about the feature, the sales team knew how to use and sell the new feature, and the product marketing team had documentation prepared for how the feature set works. Of course, all of this had to be perfectly synchronized with the engineers’ timeline for releasing the feature.

    With feature flags, product managers now essentially have the keys to the kingdom. It gives them the power to turn the feature on for some or all of their customers without waiting for engineers to complete their next deploy. Not having to coordinate that extra piece of the schedule gives a lot of power and time back to the product manager.

    A Deeper Look at Customer Feedback

    Another aspect of a product manager’s job is collecting feedback. They need to be able to answer questions related to business KPIs, such as “How is this feature performing for my customers?,” “Are customers able to do the action the feature is intended to perform?” and “Are we generating more revenue from the feature?” Feature flags can also help in this area.

    As product managers ramp up a feature, they are simultaneously shortening the feedback cycle. Since feature flags allow for segmentation, where one customer group sees one set of features and another customer group sees a different set of features, and since key metrics can be captured into separate buckets for each group, product managers can now run controlled experiments as part of the release cycle. Seeing KPIs aligned with the different customer groups helps them understand which features are performing the most successfully.

    Creating the Ideal Product Roadmap

    As product managers embrace usage measurement tied to feature rollouts, entire teams can better align with agile best practices to continuously push out the smallest incremental set of new features. By understanding the performance of every feature, you’ll be better equipped to iterate and refine your ideal product roadmap.

    — Dave Karow

  • What Makes Product Managers Effective?

    What Makes Product Managers Effective?

    Product managers can specialize in all sorts of disciplines. Some are better at hardware development while others are better at staying on budget. However, there are a number of traits that are easily identifiable in great product managers regardless of specialty.

    Great product managers share great traits including confidence, compassion and curiosity. Here are the top traits of the top-performing product managers:

    Compassionate

    The personality of a product manager is just as important as their technical skills and professional abilities. They are leaders to product developers, collaborators with clients and liaisons to executives. As such, they must have high-quality soft skills. They must show empathy to the overworked developer and passion to the client, and send reassuring updates to the c-suite. All of this is impossible without an immense capacity for compassion.

    Data-Oriented Product Managers

    Product development isn’t just an emotional journey (even when emotions run high). The team relies on a data-oriented product manager to make informed decisions that lead to satisfactory outcomes.

    While the best must show compassion for others, they also must hold themselves to a precise standard. To excel, they have to rely on objective evidence rather than just their emotional experience and “gut feelings” to carve a successful product path.

    Curious

    The best product managers are endlessly curious people who want to know why certain products work or particular strategies fail. They research obsessively and are always in the know of the latest trends.

    Curious people generally make for good employees who are bound to get better and better over time. The best product managers are proud of their curiosity and use it as a point of reference. A curious product manager will identify problems before they even arise and establish a variety of management styles to see what works.

    Confident

    Confidence is an absolute necessity for a product manager to be considered the best. Confident product managers know their decisions are well-informed and will provide results in a positive way. They are confident people who provide a sense of security and assurance to every level of a development company.

    The confidence that exudes from the best product managers is what allows them to be so effective in their roles. A confident manager enables employees to focus on their jobs and not worry about the plan ahead. Confidence brings out the best in a development team.

    Experienced

    There’s no problem with hiring a talented product manager with only a few years of experience. In fact, it works out for many companies. However, one of the most common traits shared among the best is their tenure.

    The top product managers almost always have a wealth of personal experience to draw from. As professionals, they have spent their lives working on important products, tweaking their product management methodology and learning from past mistakes.

    Conclusion

    The best product managers know that it takes a certain individual to pursue product management. Chief among them is the passion for the skill. The best of them are passionate and skilled individuals who use their acumen to help companies realize their vision. The worst are those who do it for a paycheck or as a hobby.

    Top product managers are those who work their hardest to help a company realize its goal while creating a cohesive environment. They are people who want to know the answer; people who want to find solutions to all problems that arise in development; curious and confident people who use their personality traits to bring a vision to life.

    Elite product managers use data and experience to come up with interpersonal strategies and management plans. This allows them to establish a cohesive base of operations while the development process continues at a steady pace. The best product managers have soft and hard skills to get the job done. And, they have the experience to push forward with success.

    — Anthony Coggine

  • In Product Development, Transparency is the New Agility

    In Product Development, Transparency is the New Agility

    The rise of DevOps has shown that agility and speed are key drivers for turning a business into a high-growth company. But as product managers, that’s not all we can take away from the DevOps culture. Those same methodologies that enable DevOps to function, such as having cross-functional teams and embracing a culture that embraces transparency, can also help product teams adopt experimentation.

    The product cycle should be an ongoing opportunity to try new ideas, gather data, make changes and celebrate failure. Teams with an experimentation mindset are better-suited to accept these goals, knowing that they lead to learning and succeeding quickly. Yet, experimentation and developing innovative products will succeed only when there’s a foundation of transparency—and not just about financial data and company successes, though that certainly helps. Everyone on the team needs the freedom, insight and tooling to make big bets, as well as the accountability to see them through.

    This is where DevOps comes in. Leaders at the C-suite and VP level need to apply DevOps systems to product development to stay agile. Here are three ways to do so:

    Make Development a Collaborative Process

    DevOps brings IT and engineers together to meet customer and business needs. Product development teams should adopt a similar cross-functional team culture to remove silos. When product managers, sales managers, success managers and developers have regular and open conversations about industry trends, customer requests and big successes, they’ll have more insights in the customer experience and product road map that can help each team be more effective. For example, sales managers interact with customers daily and bring a broad perspective about customer problems, while product managers can gauge whether the ideas align with the business goals and developers can assess whether ideas are feasible to implement.

    At Optimizely, I encourage my team to brainstorm several big bet ideas on a quarterly basis and discuss whether these ideas are new offerings we need to build or buy or whether we can build on into our current offerings. This collaborative process gives the product, sales and developer teams insight into what other teams are thinking about and encourages all of the teams to put their heads together to experiment with new ideas. Recurring brainstorm sessions that incorporate recent trends will ensure the team stays agile.

    We also have a collaborative product feedback process that allows go-to-market teams to suggest features to the product team at any time and have a conversation around the business benefits of feature delivery. This is accomplished with pods of product areas comprised of product, design, engineering, product marketing, success and sales. The members of the pod meet weekly at standups and biweekly at product reviews to ensure alignment between what is being built and what the go-to-market teams are hearing from customers and prospects.

    Shop Around Your Proof of Concept and Be Ready to Course-Correct

    Product development isn’t a one-and-done process. It requires building minimum viable product, collecting feedback and revising. At Optimizely, we try new ideas and first get feedback from our internal teams and around five trusted customers to start. We implement their feedback and updates before rolling the feature or product out with a slightly larger subset of beta customers, around 20 or 30. With even more feedback, we continue to improve and build on the product, rolling it out to larger and larger customer groups under beta before making it generally available.

    As feedback is collected, it’s important to bring our cross-functional teams together to analyze the comments and bring their different perspectives, whether it be customer-centric or developer-focused. We have to be willing to accept the feedback we get and make changes based on it. A recent example is when we rolled out Optimizely X Experimentation, which was built with reusability in mind to overcome some of the issues of Optimizely Classic. While this was a worthwhile goal and customers wanted reusability, we ended up overcorrecting and having to build new workflows after the fact. These ended up looking more like Classic and were more user-friendly but less reusable across experiments.

    Hire Product Managers who Prioritize Trust and Transparency

    People underestimate the importance of getting along with your colleagues and building trust with them. That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree or have different approaches. It simply means you’ve established trust and open communication—and you’re open to hearing and considering these differing opinions. These two elements are key for staying agile and quickly adapting to industry trends. You often heard the phrase “strong opinion, weakly held” at Optimizely, which encourages lively debate.

    At Optimizely, we evaluate trust and transparency by having engineers and marketers interview prospective product managers to make sure the candidate can build trust with different teams and see pain points and priorities from various perspectives. During the interview process, it’s equally important that people acknowledge their mistakes and are able to learn from them. If a candidate can’t think of a mistake or explain what they learned from one, they likely aren’t taking enough risks or reflecting on their failures. Opening up about failures creates trust that leads to better teamwork and ultimately better business decisions.

    Ultimately, we can all take a page from the DevOps playbook to make trust and transparency a priority on our teams. Those who do will see new business ideas flourish and team members work in a more cohesive way.

    About the Author / William Gradin

    William Gradin is the VP of product management at Optimizely and is responsible for building the Experimentation Platform to help businesses boldly test their assumptions and respond more quickly to ever-changing market dynamics and customer expectations. Prior to joining Optimizely in 2015, Will worked in Product Management at Salesforce, where he owned the Platform teams for the Salesforce Communities product. Connect with him on LinkedIn.