Product Proverb #3: Honesty is the best policy
How can honesty help you be a successful product manager and become a product leader others want to follow? Check these simple tips to stay honest about your product, and be honest with your team, and with your customers.
Honest product diagnosis
Every good product strategy starts with a diagnosis.
A diagnosis defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
To run a proper diagnosis exercise you need a ton of data, solid customer research, and… a fair bit of honesty. Without this essential ingredient, it is easy to fall into the trap of defining a challenge that you are ready to face rather than the challenge that you have to face.
The complexity of the product world is overwhelming. There are different markets to win. There are many opportunities and conflicting priorities. There are thousands of customer requests. The role of diagnosis is to simplify this picture. But our human nature (we like things to be easy) pushes us into oversimplification.
This is why honesty is especially important when we are facing a big challenge.
In product reality, it is more valuable to confront the most painful truth than to avoid it. If you don’t define and face the true challenge, you will not realize your product vision.
To diagnose the condition of your product in an honest way you should:
- Reach out to your most challenging customers and ask them for feedback.
- Read and reflect on all the “zeros” in your customer satisfaction surveys.
- Don’t settle down if data is showing an overly optimistic picture. Poke deep to make sure you get to the core of the problem.
- Look for challenges where you expect them the least. Your strategy will turn them into opportunities.
Honesty with and about your team
The same “honesty rule” applies to diagnosing the condition of your team. Even the best product strategy is worthless without a passionate and motivated product team behind it.
Teams are dynamic systems that go through many transitions and fluctuations. Even a small change of context — the departure of a single team member or the addition of another one — may impact your team’s productivity.
To be successful your team has to operate in the context that they understand. Empower your team to explore further. The team has to understand the condition of the product (see the paragraph about the honest diagnosis). They have to be clear about roles and responsibilities and be able to resolve conflicts. Team members have to experience psychological safety. This is only possible where honesty is a shared team value.
- Include your team in your diagnosis and strategy work. Empower them to help solve the problems and go after opportunities you identify.
- Define roles and responsibilities to help the team work effectively.
- Run team health monitor play; don’t avoid this exercise when you can see your team is struggling. A health monitor is a great team diagnostic tool.
- Face and resolve conflicts in your team with urgency.
Honesty with customers
Last but not least, to lead your team and build successful products, you have to be honest with your customers. PMs have to navigate among customer requests, capacity challenges, and market twists and turns, which requires difficult decisions and hard trade-offs. Two essential skills of a successful product manager are:
- making decisions and
- communicating these decisions.
All product managers know that you cannot make everyone happy. Your strategy dictates where you focus. It informs your investment decisions — what you say “yes” to, and what is a clear “no”. By staying honest with your customers you build long-term relationships and strengthen trust.
Check these tactics to keep open and honest communication with your customers:
- Share your product plans e.g. through product roadmap and update it on a regular basis. Some great examples from Atlassian, GitHub, Microsoft
- Keep your internal roadmap up-to-date. Your support team or sales organization will appreciate extra detail and internal context. They can use it when the customer asks additional questions.
- Let customers know if you decided not to invest in a particular problem. Especially if it is one that gets significant traction. Customers will appreciate an honest “no” more that your indecisive silence.
- Whenever you say “no” to something, make sure you can explain the “why” behind your decision. If possible, show customers alternative paths they can choose to address the problem.
- Create a transparent escalation process for customers (you can choose to limit this to your VIP segment). Make sure customers can share their frustrations and let you know when they are stuck.
I would love to hear from you. Let me know if and when honesty helped you make better product decisions.
This is a mini-series about general truths that are particularly helpful for Product Managers. Enriched with a set of tips and tricks, I hope PMs will find my Product Proverbs helpful. Enjoy!
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Photo: Kasia Derenda
