5 Ways Every Development Manager Can Boost Team Performance
When you take on the development manager role, it can feel like you're doing a little bit of everything. Your job is no longer to focus purely on code — and you're not leading your average team. In your day-to-day, you're representing, strategizing for, and even developing with your engineering team.
With all the tasks filling your to-do list, it can be easy to forget: Getting quality results depends on the quality of your leadership. Work isn't just about projects — and you're not a project manager. Great development managers are equally as good at working with people, building culture, and supporting their team members as they are at boosting efficiency and working on all things technical.
To get the most out of your team, here are five tips that every development manager needs to know to get the best from their team.
1. Offer guidance, not micromanagement
Have you ever gotten anything done with someone breathing down your neck? It's not comfortable, and it creates a culture of distrust. In an agile environment, this goes against the principle of having a self-organizing team — one in which each team member takes charge of their own responsibilities and timelines.
A great development manager knows that each team member contributes their own unique work experience and knowledge to a team. Your job description isn't to do other people's jobs for them or boss them around. Rather, it's to ensure the engineering team produces quality products in a timely manner.
You'll get more out of your team by inspiring them instead of telling them what to do. Instead of dictating deadlines, guide your team in the right direction by illustrating the importance of your priority projects.
How will each person's contribution impact the broader company? How will finishing one task early unlock new opportunities for the team? Nudge your employees toward better decisions that they make themselves to build a team that's enthusiastic about their work.
2. Plan with the big picture in mind
While members of your product development team may be diving into the details — writing code, checking off smaller tasks — your job as a development manager is to think big. Development managers play a key role in the agile planning process by figuring out which projects their team should prioritize and how to best complete them.
Instead of just thinking solely about what's best for your team, you need to consider which projects and tasks best align with your company's broader business goals. This will help you build a development team that creates stand-out results for the entire company.
At the same time, you should be fully aware of what's possible for your team to take on. Will committing to one new product up one person's workload far more than others? Does your team have the capacity for more work at all? No matter how many years of experience your team has, they — as individuals and as a whole — need room to breathe so they don't burn out.
3. Keep your technical skills up-to-date
"Manager" may be the brag-worthy highlight of your job title, but that doesn't mean you can let your technical skills go. Odds are, coding will still make up a chunk of your day-to-day — or at least your week-to-week. Even when you're not directly assigned to a software development task, you'll still need to guide your team members through their individual tasks.
To give your team the support they need, you need to be able to speak their coding language. This will help you lead code reviews, take part in technical conversations, anticipate (and prevent) roadblocks, and ensure you're implementing the most efficient technologies. Regularly taking courses and joining a coding community are two simple ways to be a problem-solving champion for your engineering team.
Your technical expertise will help your team stick to your product roadmaps and meet key milestones.
4. Bolster your communication skills
When you take on the development manager job, you become a liaison between your engineering team and other parts of your organization. For example, you might communicate the needs of your developers to senior management or pass on requests from sales managers to your team.
People without a technical background might think you're talking about music if you start talking about C#. Engineers without business management experience may roll their eyes if you start talking about five-year plans instead of an upcoming product launch. Even though coworkers share the same company culture, they don't necessarily "get" each other all the time.
Developer managers are translators who represent their team and deliver messages back to them as needed.
Since you're constantly working with people from different backgrounds, you need to strengthen your interpersonal skills. Get to know how you can best communicate with different people. Which teams prefer email over texting? Who's the go-to contact person for each team? Does anyone listen better when they're not hungry? 🙋
The stronger your communication skills are, the more likely your team will get the resources they need, and the better they'll connect their priorities to your company's.
5. Be available to support your team members
Development manager may be a part-time managerial and part-time technical role, but in this position, you need to be a full-time leader for your team. When you want to consistently improve your team's output, you need to put your top-notch leadership skills into practice day in and day out.
As a development manager, you need to act as a coach of sorts for your team members. Schedule out recurring one-on-ones with your team members, during which you can chat about career goals and pain points on top of current projects. When you have a new hire, chat with them about their desired career path during the onboarding stage.
Based on what you learn, you can brainstorm ways to support their professional development. You don't have to pay for their bachelor's degree to help them succeed. Connect them to mentors, send them to conferences, recommend them for speaking opportunities — your options are endless (and simpler than you may think).
Offering support on both current projects and in long-term career goals is your chance to invest in your employees. It'll help them become better workers — and they'll feel valued, too. Did you know nearly half of employees leave their jobs to gain new skills? Keeping your development team at its best in the long run requires you to help each employee grow.
Lead your team as an effective development manager
Leading your development team to success takes an unbeatable blend of people skills, technical skills, and leadership skills. In your multi-faceted role, your ability to communicate and align your team with the rest of your organization is invaluable.
With Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira, you can make team alignment simpler by dragging and dropping any Jira issue on a visual timeline. Watch our demo today to see how this tool can help your engineering team shine!
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Workflow7 Product Launch Planning Strategies for Development Teams
Simply developing a product doesn’t mean it’ll be a success. Plenty of elements determine how well a product is received — and a lot of that begins with product launch planning.
How will you unveil your product to the world? Who will be able to access your product when it first launches? What features do you need for the product's initial development, and what features should be saved for further down the road? How do you make sure everything is ready in time for the launch date you’re hoping for?
Product launch planning melds your development strategy and your sales and marketing strategy to ensure every department works together and aligns on key goals. It’s a whirlwind of a race to the finish line, but it’s also an exciting time for product developers. How will your product be received? What will customers and stakeholders think?
In this post, we discuss seven key strategies for successful product launch planning. Time for takeoff! 🚀
1. Set clear goals and define what success looks like
Set clear objectives and be realistic about what you hope to accomplish. Setting lofty, unattainable goals will distract from what matters most, and it can lead to disappointment, lack of motivation, and reduced morale.
Be clear about who on the product team is responsible for what and ensure team members outside of product development, including sales teams and marketing teams, are involved in product launch planning.
How will you go to market? What do you hope to accomplish with your launch? What product launch planning needs to happen before you can move forward? What pre-launch deliverables are critical to moving development forward? What roadblocks could prevent your success?
When you understand what you are trying to accomplish, it’s easier to tell when you’re successful. Don’t leave anything open-ended so that everyone on the team knows what you’re working toward and how to get there.
2. Get to know your audience
Great products are developed when customer needs are at the forefront of decision making. No matter what stage of product launch planning you’re in, you should always keep the customer journey top of mind. Consider how each decision you make brings value to your customers.
Customer personas describe important details about a target audience, such as pain points, behavioral patterns, demographics, goals, and buying habits. Deeply understanding who you are building a product for and what they need is vital to a successful product and a successful product launch.
Easy Agile TeamRhythm supports user story mapping, helping teams empathize with customers so that development and launch decisions can be made based on what will provide the most value to your target market.
3. Gather feedback and test, test, test
Test, test, test! We can’t say this enough. You need to continually test, ask questions, and gather market research.
Get your product in front of stakeholders and customers frequently to gather feedback along the way. The more you learn as you develop your product, the more issues you will sort out as you go, and the better the project will be in the end.
The testing process will also give you a deeper insight into what your users are looking for, so you can better meet customer needs. How do they interact with the product? What issues arise? What questions do they have? Do they understand how to use it? What features are they looking for?
Gather as much feedback as possible so you can continually improve the product leading up to the launch. Bring your stakeholders and customers into your process to better understand their needs and how you can provide consistent value.
4. Use comprehensive tools to track product launch planning
Product launch planning is a complex process with many moving parts, team members, and deadlines. Having the right tools is essential to the success of the launch. The whole team needs to be able to see what is planned, what is expected, and how each piece leading up to the launch is connected.
Establish a clear product launch plan template that guides the team forward. Backtrack from the desired launch date to create a launch timeline that recognizes everything that needs to get done before the product is put out into the world.
A product launch roadmap is an effective tool for tracking your progress. Roadmaps help teams align their vision, keep track of specific product launch dates, and provide a clear visual of the most critical prioritizations.
Learn how to create a product roadmap template with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira. They help teams align around a product vision and launch strategy to continually bring value to customers.
5. Focus on an initial great product, not features
Focus on your minimum viable product first. This is your top development priority before launching — no matter how tempting other fancy features may be.
Fancy features may be appealing, but they could slow down development, add unnecessary stress on the team, and cause unwelcome issues right before you’re supposed to launch your product. Put in the work to develop a product that meets stakeholder needs and delights customers. If this goes well, there will be plenty of opportunities to zero in on other features down the road.
6. Expect the unexpected
No matter how much feedback you gather and how many tests you run, there are always surprises when it comes to launching a new product. Launch day may not go as smoothly as you hoped. It’s okay if things don’t go exactly as you expected, so long as you’ve prepared for these possibilities and can adjust.
Extensive product launch planning will help you navigate surprises. It also helps to practice the motions beforehand. Give yourself time before the new product launch to review and practice the steps that need to play out. Rehearse your process to smooth out as many possible hiccups as you can. The extra time you spend running through the motions will also help ease the nerves of the team members involved in the launch process.
7. Hold a retrospective after the launch
After all is said and done, there’s still one more important step to your product launch planning. A retrospective helps teams examine the launch strategy and how everything played out. What went well? What didn’t go so well? And what can be learned from the process?
Even if you won’t launch another product any time soon, a post-launch retrospective is a great opportunity to learn from your experience. You can take these insights and success metrics into account when launching future features or other products down the road. Plus, it gives the team a chance to debrief after launch activities conclude.
Let’s recap those strategies one more time:
1. Set clear goals and define what success looks like.
2. Get to know your audience.
3. Gather feedback and test, test, test.
4. Use comprehensive tools to track product launch planning.
5. Focus on an initial great product, not features.
6. Expect the unexpected.
7. Hold a retrospective after the launch.
Learn more on the Easy Agile blog
There’s more where this came from. We’re dedicated to helping teams work better using agile tools and practices. We make simple, collaborative, customer-focused plugins for Jira, and we regularly publish articles on strategies, agile information, and how-to guides for product managers and agile teams.
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Agile Best Practice7 Product Management Software Tools to Streamline Development
You can find dozens of product management tools that fit SaaS goals.
These tools vary in features, functionality, and pricing. However, one thing is certain: Product management tools are more supportive than ever before.
Find out what product management can best support your software development.
What are product management software tools?
Product management software tools help to guide software development teams through their workflow.
Product management tools can help team members conduct research, create assessments, do iterations, and plan their product launches. Some tools even support roadmapping product development, so they can support agile teams.
Development teams can use roadmapping tools to:
- Streamline product strategy
- Draw up their product plan
- Create their product roadmaps
- Develop user journey maps
- Manage backlogs
- Conduct research on customer needs
- Improve prioritization of product features
- Determine the length of their Scrum sprints
- Analyze data for their product research
- Do process mapping
- Manage product releases
- Improve how agile teams collaborate
- Create new products
- Deliver better products
- Message team members
Using product management tools are ideal when working with remote teams. It is also the solution to increasing collaboration across cross-functional teams.
Many or most of these product management tools also integrate well with existing software, so it’s no big deal to customize existing systems. You can also customize many of these product management tools to meet your product team’s needs.
Here are eight of the most recognizable product software tools available to start your new roadmapping journey.
1. Jira
Jira is typically seen as the best product management software tool for software development. However, many other industries use Jira for roadmapping and managing their projects. This popularity is due to the fact that Jira offers a free plan, but it goes deeper than that.
Jira is the ideal software management tool to use in managing Scrum, Kanban, Waterfall, and other agile methodologies. The user interface is intuitive, making it easy and convenient to use whether you’re a product manager for software or other products. Because it is also a convenient tool, you can use it to assign tasks and manage projects and product development.
Product managers can easily keep track of workflows, agile team responsibilities, and tasks. You get to see where backlogs are building in Scrum or Kanban. You can also manage velocity charts, burndown charts, release burndown and sprint reports with Jira software.
You can also include software like Slack, GitHub, and others to round off your Jira product management tool.
Some of the key features you can anticipate in this software include:
- Visually capturing the product vision to develop better products
- Collaboration tools to keep teams on board in real-time
- Gantt charts to view project and product progress
- A Scrum or Kanban board
- User-friendly roadmaps
- Milestone tracking
- Portfolio management
- Comprehensive Agle reporting
- Extensive automation of the product management process
- The ability to connect codes with issues
In terms of pricing, small businesses often go for the free plan. Jira’s free plan allows 10 users to access roadmapping and other features simultaneously. The paid plan is about $7 monthly for each user.
Agile teams using Jira can benefit from Easy Agile Programs for Jira. It helps teams align on their goals, focus on features and epics, and view dependencies. However, all Easy Agile plugins work with Jira. They simplify everything from PI planning to creating personas and roadmaps.
2. Trello
Trello uses a card system to manage Kanban and other product development workflows. When the administrator sets up the Trello board, product teams get a visual representation of workflows. They can see user stories, who is responsible for tasks, and an overall view of workflow and product life cycles. All these features and others make for an excellent roadmap tool.
The disadvantage of this system is that it doesn’t have a calendar. Another drawback is it offers basic folders for task categorization. It will be difficult to use Trello for Scrum, for example, as you have limited access to folders and there are no subfolders. You can however access multiple user stories to streamline workflows for simple projects.
Despite these drawbacks, Trello does include workflow automation, courtesy of the Butler robot. This little robot feature enables you to set certain rules and calendar triggers so that you can automate repeating assignments. Trello is probably better suited to startups or tracking progress when you have a small salesforce.
Because the Trello platform is simple (but intuitive), team collaboration is convenient. Communicating via Trello is also user-friendly, helping product teams to immediately see who is doing what and task deadlines.
While Trello defaults to the Kanban methodology, you can use it for other project types.
Several features you can look forward to on Trello, include:
- Prioritization of tasks
- Tracking deadlines
- Gantt charts
- Kanban board
- Tools for Agile team collaboration
- Resource and task management
- Automation of workflows
- Tracking team member progress
- Various templates
Trello has a free plan where product managers can use up to 10 boards for each of their teams. You can also purchase the pain plan on a yearly basis, which costs around $10 per user.
3. Wrike
Wrike is as much a tool for streamlining workflows as it is for managing product development. Wrike is flexible, adaptable, and dynamic and is a tool designed for better product decisions.
You can use it for small product management, single client management, or as an enterprise-wide tool for product management. Wrike is also versatile enough to use in software product development or marketing. This platform also has a special tool for marketing, making it easier to manage salesforce operations.
Wrike is customizable, so you can include Gantt charts and Kanban boards to improve team member collaboration. Another function of this platform is its Work Intelligence AI tool which product managers can use for automation and predict product risk.
Wrike works well with Jira, Slack, GitHub, Dropbox, and several other tools. You can also customize other integrations to tailor Wrike for product management teams. If you want to add software which this platform doesn’t support, you can. You simply create the solution you need.
The most prominent features of Wrike are:
- The ability to integrate third-party applications
- Its comprehensive, versatile API
- Managing multiple template options
- Permission and access control
- Importing and exporting data
- Integration of spreadsheets and tables
- Convenient task management
- A user interface for dragging and dropping
- Categorizing and structuring product tasks
- Calendar and timeline control
- Files and documents management
- Tracking activities and progress
- Filtering of data
- Stats and reporting
- Shared or public workspace
Wrike offers a free plan for the use of simple features, but you need to pay about $9.80 a month for each user to access more complex functionality.
4. Productboard
Productboard is right up there with the likes of Zendesk. It provides one of the best features for gathering user feedback. As every software development team knows, user feedback can make or break product success. With this product, you can categorize customer feedback, turn this into valuable information and prioritize this feedback.
Productboard lets you track their feedback during the lifecycle of each product via a portal. This portal supports idea exchange and management, which team members use as inputs to increase product value. This software tool is also great for collecting use cases and understanding user behavior to create the right products for customers.
You can use Slack and email with the Productboard, but if you want additional software integration, you must arrange this yourself. Fortunately, the API in this product is user-friendly to make this happen.
The main features of Productboard include:
- Storehouses for product feedback
- Customer segments that are particularly dynamic
- The ability to prioritize and categorize customer feedback
- Transforming feedback into valuable insights
- A powerful system for value assessment
- Roadmapping tools that you can customize
- Prioritization of tasks
You can get an annual Productboard basic plan at around $20 a month for every user.
5. ProdPad
ProdPad takes the user experience into consideration. It has a lean roadmapping function that you can use to highlight goals and objectives. You can experiment with this product software tool to include user feedback in product development. ProdPad is also known as being among the best product management software tools on the market.
The product roadmap tools are simple to use and include color coding for roadmapping. ProdPad has an easy drag-and-drop feature, privacy settings, and you can use the priority checkpoints as you need.
Development teams can access an ideas management feature to create priority charts. Here, they can see how backlogs influence impact and effort charts in workflows. You can also simply import data from other sources to boost new product development if necessary.
One more feature that characterizes ProdPad is the ability of team members to see associations between user ideas and product development. They can also develop customer lists to question further about their product experiences.
You can collect use cases and understand user behavior better. You can then use all this information as inputs for new product development.
Features that you can expect from this product management tool are:
- Idea generation and capture
- Capture and storage of customer feedback
- Integration with apps that support customer feedback
- Integration with other third-party apps
- Priority charting of ideas
- Lean product roadmaps
- Product roadmapping based on objectives
- Creation of customer portfolios
You can purchase ProdPad’s Essential Plan at about $149 per month for annual billing. This plan allows you to use three administrators or editors for product planning.
6. Asana
Asana is also a useful management platform. You can use it as a solution to roadmap workflows. Asana is popular among small business startups and larger enterprises.
This management solution is cloud-based. It enables team members to share their workspace and assign and track tasks and work progress. Asana is also an excellent platform for team members to collaborate.
You don’t get much customer support with Asana. And, although not ideal for complex team management, Asana has many redeeming features, some of which include:
- Excellent team messaging and collaboration
- Ideal for outlining detailed goals
- Efficient for managing multiple tasks and team members
- A user-friendly dashboard
- Tracking of milestones
- Automation
- Several templates option
- Project planning functionality
- Multiple analytics and reporting options
- Managing resources
- Tracking of time and expenses
Asana has a free plan if you can cope with limited features. Paid plans begin at approximately $10.99 per month for each user. The company bills annually.
7. GLIDR
There are multiple management solutions for streamlining product workflows. GLIDR offers one more platform from which to achieve product software development goals. You can develop detailed product plans that meet customer expectations. GLIDR highlights the customer experience, so places their feedback at the forefront of the best product deliverables.
You can manage product research, use cases, and user behavior on this platform. You can then create product specs, link ideas, create viable user stories, prioritize features, and much more.
GLIDR provides several board view options that help software developers to create themes from ideas. You can also categorize ideas by their status, fill in timelines, or show these ideas on Kanban boards.
Other helpful functions include the ability to integrate apps such as Intercom and Zendesk with GLIDR. You can also link Jira and Trello with this product management software.
Product managers and teams can use GLIDR to streamline their workflows, track product progress, create reports and transform roadmaps into the best products possible.
The primary features of GLIDR include:
- Product canvasses
- Public roadmapping
- Options for research and experimentation
- Trend scores to rank ideas
- Prioritization of features
- Activity feeds
- Progress tracking and monitoring
- User-friendly dashboards
- Reporting that you can export via PDF format
You can test GLIDR for free for 14 days. Then, the cheapest option is about $8 per person, per month for a team of five people. GLIDR bills annually and has three other plan options that give you access to more features.
Up your game with Easy Agile
One way to up your product management software game is to take advantage of Easy Agile resources. You can either use our Jira apps to integrate with existing product management platforms or give your existing system a boost.
Select from apps for Kanban Workflow for Jira or boost product development performance with User Story Maps for Jira.
Up your game with Easy Agile Roadmaps for Jira to guide your team to product success or use our Programs for Jira for Program Increment Planning.
Whichever apps you choose (all of them?), you can improve product team management with the best product management software available.
Agile Best PracticeWhat Does a Great Product Manager Look Like?
There's a lot in common between a Product Manager and the executive president of a professional sports club. Don't buy it? Well, you should 😋, and here's why.
- Both are experts in their businesses.
- They both know what it takes to win. 🏆
- They're great leaders of their teams.
Stay tuned because this article will give you a grasp of how unique the product management role is. You'll learn what their responsibilities are and more.
And if you landed a job opportunity as Product Manager, we'll give you a hand with mastering your craft. 🥇
But first things first: defining the role. And once you know this, we’ll move on to exploring their tasks, unique characteristics, and the challenges they face.
What's a product manager?
For context, let's start with product management’s role in PI (Product Increment) Planning.
According to our Guide to PI Planning, the Product Manager must understand the customer needs and validate solutions against those needs. That’s the starting point and foundation for their role. But that's still generic. 🤔
The Product Manager is THE product expert. That makes them the best-equipped team member to make strategic decisions about the product. These decisions affect the work of a lot of people in a company.
The Product Manager is a product visionary and strategist. They monitor and analyze the market competition. That's how they define a unique product vision and product strategy. Their ultimate goal is to add unique value to the market based on customer needs.
The Product Manager decides what products or product features to build and in what order. This means they prioritize new products or new features in an existing product. Defining a product vision and a product strategy is intimately related to prioritization. They must do their best effort to maximize both customer value and business value. Not an easy challenge!
The Product Manager leads the teams responsible for developing a new product or improving an existing one. They usually work across cross-functional teams, so leading them demands a great deal of organization from the Product Manager. Plus, they need the ability to bridge, communicate with, and supervise engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support staff.
The Product Manager participates in all stages of product development, from planning and conception to launch or release. But what tasks do they do?
The product manager's tasks
You already know some of the product management tasks. But here's a comprehensive list of product management tasks:
- Understand, identify, and, if necessary, represent customer pain points and business challenges.
- Manage the process of generating new ideas for products or features, and decide which ideas to move forward with.
- Describe a product vision, and align all teams with that vision, especially in large companies.
- Create and maintain the product roadmap.
- Design a strategy for product development.
- Limit the project scope.
- Rank features against the product strategy, business goals, customer value, and customer or user feedback.
- Specify the requirements for each feature.
- Define the launch or release process, which comprises phases and milestones.
- Manage dependencies within and between phases.
- Identify the deliverables and corresponding due dates for the cross-functional teams.
- Coordinate the activities of each team from product development until launching the product into the market.
- Validate product design and implementation.
- Ensure the successful launch or release of the product.
Now, are you working with Scrum? If so, you might be wondering about the differences between the Product Manager and the Product Owner.
Product managers vs. product owners
Although they may interchange tasks, they're distinct roles. In short, the latter works towards realizing the product vision and the product strategy that the first defines.
The Product Owner works more closely with the software development team. On the other hand, the Product Manager interfaces directly with customers, users, and partners.
Sometimes, when there's no Product Manager, the Product Owner steps into this role. However, in that case, there's little time to coordinate the work of all teams around the same product vision.
But regardless of whether there’s an existing Product Owner, there are key ingredients that make good and great Product Managers. Let's discuss that next.
What makes a great product manager?
The characteristics of a great Product Manager consist of technical skills and personality traits. So, besides technical skills, they should have a high EQ (emotional coefficient). This means:
- Showing customers and users empathy during any communication with them
- Developing trustworthy relationships with internal teams and external stakeholders
- Inspiring and motivating team members
- Discretely persuading people to take the necessary steps to achieve a common goal, which starts with listening to them
- Avoiding bias in the preference for solutions by being user-centric and ensuring that solutions answer user needs
- Managing stress and performing well under pressure
- Demonstrating the urgency of task completion without causing panic
- Knowing how to ask the best questions to the right people at the right time
- Delegating the power of decision-making by giving teams a methodology and criteria for escalating if needed
- Daring to confidently make strong statements about priorities, advocating for any of their decisions
- Having the courage to choose whom to favor with a decision, whether it’s engineering, marketing, or sales
- Not being afraid of changes such as defining a new product strategy for business growth
- Reading the emotions of customers, users, and internal team members, and capturing their concerns
If they tick all or most of the above, the Product Manager is on the way to being emotionally intelligent.
Typical results from an outstanding product manager
If the Product Manager has a high EQ, they'll be the best at:
- Growing teams to become high-performing
- Negotiating with customers, users, partners, and people from different departments
- Resolving conflicts that might get in the way of cross-functional teams that make successful products
- Getting more funds, top talent, and other kinds of support or resources
- Prioritizing according to customer pain points
- Making sure the development team knows users actually need the changes they're implementing
- Obtaining the best trade-offs between the different individuals and teams involved and interested in a product's development
Ultimately, customers will trust the Product Manager to fix problems with the product. Plus, engineers will accept going the extra mile to incorporate a microfeature on short notice. And if the Product Manager is always calm and cool, management will trust their work.
At this point, you know how personality matters to the success of the product management role. Next, discover how the type of product and its users also affect their work.
The right measure of technicality
The more complex a technical product is, the more experience the Product Manager should have with building similar products.
On the other hand, for a less complex technical product, experience with launching products and supporting customers is enough.
Summing up, the Product Manager knows how to talk with the users of a product and the customer. Additionally, they have at least a basic technical understanding of the product.
But wait! That's not all. Product Managers also do some magic when interacting with engineers and top management.
Connecting with engineers and top management is key
The Product Manager should establish, maintain, and manage a relationship with the engineering team and top management.
Relating to the engineers
The relationship between the Product Manager and the engineering team depends on the company's view of the product development process. And it can be done in three different ways:
- The Product Manager hands the product requirements to the engineering team, which transforms them into technical requirements.
- Engineers develop the product, which the Product Manager validates and sometimes monetizes.
- The Product Manager and the engineering team collaborate closely to develop the product.
❌ The first approach is not that agile or quick. In fact, it resembles a waterfall approach to product development that takes ages to get to a viable product. Also, engineers focus on coding and might lose focus on UX (user experience).
❌ The second alternative might innovate by creating new customer and user needs. Nevertheless, user feedback might come in too late to align the product with user needs without costing more.
✔️ Last, in the third option, the Product Manager and the engineering team gather requirements and make decisions together. The first doesn't tell the latter how to code, and the latter doesn't tell the first how to prioritize. The result is better UX, faster product development, and better product quality. And everyone's happy! 🎉
Relating to top management
The Product Manager should work closely not only with the engineering team but also with top management. The involvement of top management in the product development process is crucial to product success and the success of the product management role.
The more top management is involved in product development, the more the Product Manager is in a support role. And that's truer for young companies.
In a startup environment, the Product Manager often doesn’t lead the idea generation process. Another downside of young companies for those professionals is that they have less influence on the product vision.
It's time to consider how a company’s maturity impacts the product management role.
How company maturity influences the product manager
The company's maturity influences the Product Manager's performance and success. In a startup, this role should be more versatile. On the other hand, the role is narrower and has clearer boundaries in a mature company.
So, in a startup, the Product Manager might be responsible for market research, pricing, and customer support. That's because startups are growing companies that often have a tight staffing budget.
But despite being highly dynamic environments, young companies represent a land of opportunities for Product Managers. They might influence the business strategy more as the company grows. And they might also have a say when it comes to using or assigning company resources.
Finally, what the Product Manager lacks in a startup, they have in abundance in a mature company. An established customer portfolio is an example of that.
Product managers are the product’s backbone
The product management role is an essential element of any technology company. Perhaps their major responsibility is to define the product strategy and play a key role in Sprint Planning or PI Planning. But they also prioritize the planned features for the increment beforehand. And they coordinate the work of teams from different departments.
At a higher level, the Product Manager must communicate with those teams. The goal is to make sure everyone is on the same page. And ultimately, they're strong leaders who trigger the development of useful and profitable products.
If you're a Product Manager looking for more tools to help manage your product, check out Easy Agile's tools. Our roadmapping tool for Jira might help you sequence features for delivery to your customers. And Easy Agile's PI Planning solution for Jira might help you visualize program dependencies and milestones, plus do cross-team planning.