Six months as a Product Manager

Moving into Product Management had been something I had been thinking about for a number of years at OpenText. The idea first became exciting when working directly with R&D when I was handling escalations in Customer Support, and later as I moved into handling our internal deployments of Content Server. In this capacity I was more involved in the release cycle of the software and increased my exposure to different teams inside of R&D. I was lucky enough to move into a Product Management role six months ago. It has been a very exciting time with lots of learning, however it has been very rewarding.

What have I learned so far is hard to condense down into a single blog post, however here are a few key things that come to mind today.

• Product Management and Development as a whole is very much a team sport. The people you work with will allow for great things to happen as you push each other to meet deadlines and accomplish goals. To that end the Product Manager should work to decrease friction between teams as much as possible and set reasonable goals and deadlines.
• Any specific timeline is far more fluid than I expected before entering this role. Estimates are far harder to get right than I had expected as well. Without diving into the whole problem and looking at any legacy code estimates should be treated with a grain of salt.
• Enabling Support and Operations is critical to success of the team. Without investing time into other teams that work will simply come back to your Development teams and bog them down with questions and other distractions. This will impact the overall velocity of the team. Enabling other teams might seem expensive at the start however will pay off in the long run.
• Try your best to get a holistic view of any changes you are making to the system ahead of time. If you’re adding a setting to a profile, where is that profile data consumed? What other teams may be impacted down the stream and try your best to coordinate with them with as much lead time as possible to avoid any mad-dashes to the finish line for a release.

The list I have so far is short, and there are many other lessons I have learned. However the most important part of any role is to continue learning and listening. Lean on those who have been in the role longer than you, and listen to team members who have been around for a long time.

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