Hi, my name is Naren Kochar. I'm the Senior Director of Product Management at Publicis Sapient. Today I'll be answering some questions from the internet about product management. What it is, how to be great at it, and what are the core skills that can make you a great product manager. Basically, how do you become a Jedi Master like Master Yoda?
So I'm a big Star Wars fan. So I'm going to say it's the Force. If you think about it, there's a balance. There's business requirements, there's customer requirements, and then there's the technology requirements. You're kind of operating and then obviously you have UX requirements, right? You have to balance all. And that balance is what I would call is, you know, the Force. The person who is a really good product manager knows how to operate in keeping all those, the Force in balance, as I would call it. So that's what I would call it. If you're not a Star Wars fan, see it. It's a great movie.
I know how many people think it's easy. I personally think it's not easy at all. I think product management is an incredibly hard job. Managing people, managing stakeholders, managing expectations of consumers, and I think the most important is you are singly, single, most responsible for making your product relevant in an ever so competitive world. So I don't think this is easy. People just don't know enough about product management.
Some companies use Trello, but I personally like AHA because it connects to Jira, it connects to Rally. It's almost like these guards you can place and you can kind of segregate those by quarters, by month, by release cycles. And it kind of becomes like a safe space for product managers to just get ideas from their consumers through an idea board, which is a really cool feature. If you have the right tools in your pocket to tell your story to your stakeholders, there's nothing better.
In the last 10-12 years that I've been in product management, I have consistently used the heart framework by Google. It's mostly applicable to any B2C or B2B products, so it kind of applies everywhere. So how it works is you have happiness, engagement, adoption, retention, and task success. All of these are like core things that you can track on your product. And the sooner you set them up at the launch of a product and have clear KPIs and OKRs, the better you'll be set up.
I'm actually going to answer the last part of the question first. What do you do outside of work to learn this craft? I say implement at home. I use the art of product management to manage my entire backlog of work I need to do. So that's the easiest answer I can tell you. Manage your own life first before you can manage every priority that you have in front of you. What is the process of getting better at product management? There are a couple of crafts that are super important to make you a strong product manager. These including knowing enough to be dangerous, which is knowing some part of technology, knowing exactly what your consumers ask, and most important, data. So these are like core things if you know and you apply in everyday life to your projects and you kind of drive towards a measurable outcome.
I personally love the job of product management. And I think for me, being in healthcare, which is where I spent 12-13 years building digital products, is seeing the value that it creates for people. And you can measure it. Just to give an example, during the pandemic, I launched a capability that allowed telemedicine for millions of people in New Jersey. And in many cases, where people couldn't find care, they used my digital app. And when I go back and look at some of the App Store reviews of how it's made a difference for people's lives, like one case was a mom, she couldn't find care in the middle of the night, she was panicking, but at 12 in the night, she found a physician. Brilliant, right? Like that's the kind of things that you love being a product manager. When you see people interacting with your product. So I think that's what I love being about a product manager is being able to measure the happiness or make a change in people's life. And you know, you had a small role to play in that.