Mobile Product Manager

Products are developed through a pipelines of tribes, each one seeking maximum say in the development process. Marketing, designers, developers and sales have their own culture code that do not allow them to develop complete or holistic product development view. As a PM its your responsibility to make them listen to each other in a constructive way and to understand the whole product. This means you have to be polymath or create a perception that your are. All in all this requires amazing amount of persuasive skills on PM's part.

You don't necessarily need to have all the same interests, or to laugh at the same jokes. But it helps. You should at least be able to chat with your new hire comfortably at the coffee maker/water cooler.

Just because competitors have it, doesn't mean it's a good idea. If they obsess about competitor's features will permanently deliver yesterday's technology tomorrow and that is a really bad idea. However, making sure that they stay abreast on how the market is shifting and evaluating features and products, is an important part of the role.

For a pricing question, Lin suggests triangulating between the customer's willingness to pay, competitive pricing, and cost-based pricing. Understanding the cost structure is a good basis, but won't get you all the way to the answer. Consider what alternatives the customer has and what type of demand and supply dynamics there are in the market. If you are targeting a heavily business-oriented product management role, you will need to have pricing frameworks in you back pocket so that you are not a deer in the headlights at the whiteboard.

Last but not least, you do not want to hire someone who shows up simply because there was an advertisement in the news paper. It's important that your candidate not only knows something about the company and ideally the product he will be working on, but is excited about the prospect.

Good product managers crisply define the target, the "what" (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the "what." Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out the 'how'.

The best hires are those based on mutual respect. The candidate should know more than you do in the chosen field, and be able to teach you to bridge the gap. You should feel comfortable taking instruction from your hire, within this sphere of influence. He in turn must respect your expertise and seek your advice when needed.

Typically, a mobile PM is hired when a mobile application startup reaches a certain size, where multiple projects or an increasingly complex product means that the founders do not have the capacity to be heads down in product related tasks or projects. This point of saturation is very much dependent on the company and its structure. A mobile PM can be involved in several areas, including deciding features, being involved in user interface decisions, planning project budgets and road-maps, some engineering, analytic, and also QA. A mobile PM can truly be a very versatile role, requiring a varied skill set.

If we've gotten this far and you haven't talked about being the voice of the customer, getting out and talking to users, doing any type of user research, I'm already concerned. This is your last chance to convince me you can be the voice of the customer.

If throughout the call, you've been talking about this all along, then we are in good shape. Now I want to dive into the details. Do you know how to find users or does someone do that for you? Do you know how to ask questions that aren't leading? Do you share the research with the rest of your team? Are you able to turn your learnings into actionable next steps?

A strong part of on-the-job success is to be able to identify key differentiators in a competitive marketplace. If the key differentiator is not yet there for a particular industry or marketplace, the job is to put it there. This means understanding the resources available to you, as well as understanding the needs of clients and users, and more importantly, understanding what the competition is offering, in order to produce what they are not.

The ideal candidate should be able to identify key product features for individual markets, whether this be a separate industry, or a separate culture. He should be able to prioritize these features in order to answer the needs of the industry or culture, and promote these features accordingly.

Good product managers will talk about working with analysts, UX designers and engineers (both front and back end). Listen for words that indicate they follow a continuing regular and flexible feedback loop with all parties.

One of the most important things that a product manager does is listen to needs of stakeholders and understand the motivation behind those needs. If that person doesn't have a well thought-out process for collecting information to make good decisions they will never be successful in the role. Having a pre-determined information gathering process also demonstrates their organization and process skills, which are paramount.

The candidate's attitude can be a key consideration. Obviously a mobile PM has to be at least somewhat a type A personality, in order to get results. However, if the candidate disrespects his past co-workers, monopolizes conversation within the interview, interrupts constantly, or more, these can definitely be red flags in the hiring process.

Product strategy means saying no from time to time. Product managers should prioritize by cherry-picking the project that's likely to generate 80% of the impact and forecast what that impact is, as well as the SWAG cost in resources, money and other scarce resources before they decide to build.

This framework forces a product manager to really think through themes, create a plan, allocate resources, eliminate the need to prioritize different projects against each other, and model/forecast the impact.

While most of the leadership roles (CXO/VP) in any organisation comes with some kind of explicit or implicit authority or veto powers, Product Manger (PM) role are generally not bestowed with any of such rights. PM have to earn team's trust and respect over a period of time. It create all kind of leadership challenges for PM from perception of his role in team & organisation to his ability to say 'No'.