12 essential product management best practices

Becoming a successful product manager isn’t something that happens overnight. Refining your craft can take years or even decades. In fact, most successful product managers claim that learning is a lifelong process.

However, if you’re interested in supercharging your product management skills, there are certain skills that you can put into practice. These 12 essential product management best practices will allow you to refine your abilities as a leader and team player and help you play a key role in achieving your organization’s overall goals.

Product management is a fundamental part of an organization’s overall success. It’s an avenue through which your stakeholders and management team can ensure that the products and services you release into the market can satisfy your target customer’s needs. This keeps your company profitable and pads your bottom line for years, helping you weather unpredictable business climates.

A product manager is responsible for developing the product’s strategy, roadmap, and features throughout its lifecycle. This role involves examining customer needs and using those insights to deliver a product that satisfies the customer and market, driving business growth.

Whether you’ve just started your journey as a product manager or consider yourself a seasoned professional, these best practices could benefit you. You might already be following some of these guidelines in your role, while others could be new to you. Incorporate them as you go, and don’t hesitate to partner with other experienced product managers or mentors you admire.

1. Always be open to learning

The most important tip for any product manager is always to stay open to learning, even if you have been working in your chosen industry for years.

Things can change rapidly, especially if you work in IT, data technology, or healthcare. Staying on top of new innovations and tools can help you stay competitive.

It’s not just about your personal learning journey. You’ll need to implement a mentality in your team that encourages learning and motivation to improve. Consider incorporating classes, online learning courses, or other means of ongoing education into your team trajectory.

2. Develop your product sense

If you don’t understand the products and services your company is selling, you won’t be an effective product manager in the long term.

Developing a deep understanding of your product will not only help you in team discussions but in interactions with customers and potential customers, too. Schedule regular meetings with developers and others on your team who work with the nuts and bolts of the products directly. Ensure you can speak about features and benefits effectively.

3. Understand your audience

Can you confidently say that you understand what your target audience wants and needs? Have you figured out what features and benefits mean the most to them? If not, it’s time to do some research.

There’s almost always room to improve when it comes to how you engage with your audience and understand them.

4. Gather feedback from your users and customers

Understanding the needs of your customers is the key to business growth. If your organization doesn’t regularly solicit feedback from customers and users, make plans to do so.

The method for gathering feedback can look different depending on your organization’s size and available resources. It could include emailed surveys, polls, in-person interviews, focus groups, or social media posts. Experiment with various methods to see what works best for your business.

5. Become an expert at customer interviews

Part of understanding your customers and serving them better is recognizing the value of speaking to them directly.

Customer interviews are one of the best ways to do this. Speaking to people in person allows you to see nuances that polls, surveys, and social posts don’t always reveal. Customer interviews can be a big lift, especially if you have a small team.

Some companies opt to outsource customer interviews, while others end up dedicating a subset of their team to planning and conducting them.

Get involved with interviews as much as possible, figuring out the intricacies of presenting appropriate questions and dedicating time to carefully reviewing the answers you receive.

6. Understand your business’s goals

Knowing your business’s goals is central to growing as a product manager and as an employee.

Everyone has a role to play in the organization achieving its objectives, from the newest member of your team to the most senior executive. It falls to you as a product manager to communicate these goals with your direct reports and to work hard to achieve them in everything you do.

Business goals will likely change alongside the landscape of your industry. To that end, ensure you are attending regular meetings with the leadership team. This will keep you aligned with the rest of the organization and prevent you from missing out on any important updates that could influence your roadmap going forward.

7. Speak with your team regularly

Regularly speaking with your team shows you care about their well-being and about keeping everyone on the same page. This doesn’t have to look like daily meetings unless that’s what works best for your team. Figure out how your team prefers to meet and accommodate them when possible. You can also schedule one-to-ones with individual team members, speaking about personal goals, wins, and what unique skills they bring to the company.

Make sure your team and direct reports hear about major company changes from you if possible, and always be respectful of their personal time. Work–life balance is incredibly important, and the leader who understands that will earn their team’s respect and trust.

8. Master your emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice, identify, understand, and manage your own feelings and the emotions of others. Emotionally intelligent people tend to be more effective leaders. It involves many elements, including the ability to be self-aware and socially aware and communicating with and managing people effectively.

Anyone can work to develop their emotional intelligence. It’s a learnable skill. Take time to understand your own strengths and weaknesses, making a list if necessary. Always listen to others with empathy and be curious about what other people have to say. This shows your empathy and encourages your team to trust you.

Try to practice social awareness, too. Pay attention to body language, tone of voice, and expressions. People can say a lot without even speaking a word.

9. Have a strong roadmap and plan in place

The best leaders (and the most successful employees) are the ones who operate from a roadmap.

While it’s normal to experience fluctuations as the tide of business ebbs and flows, having a general plan in place can help you and your team stay on track and reach organizational goals.

Every new product launch should have its unique plan for development and release, but you should also have your own personal roadmap. Update your goals regularly with the understanding that things can and should change.

10. Be good at competitor analysis

Knowing what your competitors are doing is key to long-term growth. Pay attention to what other businesses are doing, including how they are speaking to customers, what needs they are fulfilling with their products and services, and how they conduct marketing campaigns.

While you should be confident in your business and stand firm in your company’s voice, it can be very helpful to see how other businesses grow. Conduct regular data analysis to keep your finger on the pulse of the overall industry environment.

11. Learn to conduct surveys

Surveys are one of the most effective tools businesses have to communicate with users and clients. Surveys are relatively low-cost and can give you valuable feedback on any pain points customers might have, as well as what features and benefits they find most helpful in a product. Many businesses conduct quarterly surveys, while others do larger surveys once a year.

You’ll need to find your own pace with surveys and determine what makes sense for your company. If you don’t currently have a survey plan in place, meet with company stakeholders and discuss what is both feasible and ideal. Surveys can be easy to launch, but they still require a lift from your team. Include your team in these discussions and take their thoughts and opinions into account.

12. Become data savvy

Data is the be-all and end-all for every business. Data shows how well you’re doing as a company and how successful you are at meeting your organizational goals.

If you don’t know how to read data sheets or the basics of conducting data analysis, dedicate some time to learning these things. The more comfortable you feel parsing data, the better you’ll be at communicating this information to your team.

Dovetail’s qualitative data analysis solution is one of many data analysis tools on the market that can help you become a data whiz. These solutions make it easy to understand what’s working with your business plan and what could use some refinement.