I recently posted my thoughts on the 5W’s of Product Management. Elaborating on the first one – the WHO 🤵
One of the first things I learnt starting out in my career, was to understand people. People management skills are more important than any other skill you can develop working in IT across the board.
As a professional services consultant I could be onsite for a day or sometimes many days both on site and remote. You often had just a few minutes to get a measure of the personalities you’d be working with which set the tone for the relationship going forward. Being able to “read the room” and understand how each person reacts, behaves, responds was a key skill that has carried me in good stead for years.
Aggressive, amiable, supportive, sceptical are just many personality types I have met over the years and finding ways to interact with each to get the most out of them to help feed into whatever you’re building is essential to make sure you’re delivering something that will work.
I think the same principles transpose to developing products for a large audience (over a custom solution for a smaller/selected group). Knowing the people that will use your products is essential. Understanding their personalities, problems, expected outcomes, behaviours and their usage of your product is going to be critical.
Investing the effort in the right area based on your userbase is therefore critical. Whether that is data from platforms like GA or Hotjar, cohort interviews, workshops, document analysis or time and motion studies (in a business change scenario these can be eye opening!!), it is always time well spent before you go any further. A data entry user will have very different needs from a senior manager wanting high level visual data, from a casual browser of news headlines.
It’s also critical to keep on top of your who, as the audiences needs can alter as their knowledge of the product matures, their circumstances change or the domain you’re operating in changes. Catching this potential for churn and addressing is therefore an essential activity to keep on top of.
✅ Understand your users & their problems.
✅ Present the right data base on the user and their needs
✅ Make sure the UI suits the data, the device, the environment and the role(s) the users belong to.
