Let’s dive in deep about each of the challenge and understand few ways to overcome those.
Communication:
Typical product teams are a beautiful cross-functional mix of product managers, engineers, UX designers, developers, and testers—all with distinct roles, perspectives, and priorities.
With such a diverse team, communication must be seamless. Even excellent product roadmaps can fall apart due to misunderstandings and miscommunication.
For Email communication and internal chat, rather than sending mass content that would switch us off, be selective. For group communications send only what is relevant. Keep communications with other departments brief — set aside time for brief check-ins and save the lengthy mailings and meetings for when they are really needed.
Deadlines vs. commitments and Team alignments:
Sometimes with several moving parts on the roadmap, even if a single person in the product team cannot meet the deadlines, then the flow is derailed with the typical pressure from other departments like Stakeholders, end users (customers) etc.
It is difficult to design a lean agile schedule to allow the team to adapt and execute in iterations, but it is better to be proactive in communicating any delays as ‘Why’ it is happening for any deadline challenges as it is specifically important for cross team alignment.
Align and re-align – Change is healthy. It is inevitable that at some points, the team will find themselves out of alignment with the main product and company vision. It could be down to individual or departmental issues, but it could also be a sign that we need to adjust our vision around product or market changes and re-align and re-structure the team as and when needed with the tasks and responsibilities assigned.
Surviving with the latest trends and technologies, Time Management, Research and Trainings:
Trends and Technologies:
Market change is common as we evolve. It is also a common challenge for the product managers to keep up with the pulse of latest trends and technologies with the minimal time availability and with no clear source for identifying them.
Having Tech News group or Tech Blog and encouraging to share any productive articles or news on the new or emerging technologies and focusing on what is needed, will be fruitful to all.
Time Management:
Separating and allocating specific times for research, meetings, trainings, learnings etc. is crucial for PMs to withstand in the competitive market and not just being focused on the development engineering which is much needed for a successful product. Juggling the piling up responsibilities is never easy and is a common issue for countless professionals. Preparing to-do list beforehand, preparing a covey matrix dividing as Do (Urgent and Important), Plan (Not urgent but Important), Delegate (Urgent but not important), Eliminate (Not urgent Not important) will help manage time efficiently.
Research:
Have focused, targeted research objectives breaking into chunks and perform exploratory analysis to understand and find solutions to the problems, as it would be an endless time activity. Have questions prior to the research: Ex: “Would this product fit in the market?” or “Is the pricing reasonable” or “Has my user persona changed since the product launched?” etc. and research according to the laid questions, else in the huge amount of information that is available, it would lead to no direction.
Trainings:
Trainings could be self-training to keep up with the latest trends and Technologies, or it could be training the new hires, or the internal trainings and cross team trainings etc. It is important for the growth culture to encourage to learn, train, upskill to be counterproductive. At the same time, need to balance on information overload which might lead to uninspiring.
Satisfying varied customer needs with different topologies:
Ultimatum is the End user satisfaction. It is most needed to gauge on collecting reliable customer feedback to make better product decisions and not shoot in the dark. Along with that, it may be beneficial to use certain qualitative and quantitative tools to measure the customer satisfaction.
If the customers belong to varied topologies and geography, surveys may also help along with the tools, in understanding the customer needs.
Data Management, Privacy and Security:
Data is not standard or limited and it keeps expanding rigorously. It is always best to have plans to maintain and manage the growing data along with securing its privacy in an efficient and cost-effective manner which would be the core part of user experience.
Being transparent with the data that is collected from the customer with their consent – which means sharing what a customer needs to know to help them understand the choices they can make, being lawful biased and selective in gathering the personal data is most important and as a PM, the importance lies in communicating what data we need, how we use it, and how this benefits our customer needs.
Data management helps minimize potential errors by establishing processes and policies for usage and building trust in the data being used to make decisions across organization. With reliable, up-to-date data, we can respond more efficiently to market changes and customer needs.
Team Budgeting:
Most PM’s do not have finance training and the business financial landscape can seem overwhelming and irrelevant. But having brief information on the profitability or ROI – Return on Investment within the contribution margins, understanding the product’s revenue In and Out for the product’s financial impact will further help on appropriate resourcing, employee engagement etc.
Underpowered Product Manager – Big responsibility, little authority:
A product with an underpowered product manager is much like a vehicle with underpowered engine. The imbalance between the responsibilities and authority associated with the role has become universal challenge for a PM. If management does not fully trust the product manager or finds it difficult to delegate decision-making authority, as a result, the product manager struggles to do an effective job. For instance, to align the Scrum team, stakeholders, and customers or to exclude requirements from the release, the PM should have the authority to streamline the process.
If the PM is underpowered, then the only way to overcome is, to sharpen the interpersonal skills, which will help influence people without having any formal authority over them. As PM, we must find ways to support and add value of a PM for the “why” and drive strategic decisions for the product even with little authority. That is why the support for this role is two-fold. One, we need to build authority ourselves by leading with influence and setting an example. While on the other, the authority should result from the empowerment and support given by the company.
Overworked with Varied Product workflows – Switching roles at dizzy speeds – Plenty of work with insufficient time:
In younger organizations, switching roles at dizzy speeds is most common for a PM. Overworking is not just unhealthy and unsustainable on a personal front, but the PM’s can become bottlenecks limiting the progress further, neglecting product discovery, strategy work, product backlog refinement, missing sprint planning or sprint review meetings, and not being available for questions, with Insufficient time to perform the role and not enough support from the team which is also rooted in a wrong understanding of product ownership. The team must be supportive to the product manager to handle the enormous work in less time.
Balancing strong relationships with stakeholders, cross-functional teams, customers:
‘Expect the Unexpected’ – Reason for building strong relationships with stakeholders, cross-functional teams, and customers is to plan for the unexpected. When unexpected problems occur without a relationship, it gives sponsors the feeling that we are incompetent.
One needs to think how we can help stakeholders or customers and not just the product. PM should be elegant, professional, authentic, seek genuine feedback and build trust and confidence by managing and meeting expectations, operating with integrity, keeping promises, and being dependable by resolving conflicts between stakeholders and requirements.
Identifying and working with the right tools:
With the availability of numerous tools in the market for Product management, it is important to identify what suits best for the Product within the organization, and within the budget. The tools should help the product for – efficient Road mapping, Strategizing, Design and wireframing, Backlog maintenance, User experience testing, User Onboarding, Analytics, Collaboration and Productivity, Feedback and surveys, Sprints (Tasks) and workflow management etc. (Not limited to these but varies on the product, organization, and budget)
Roadmap, Product Strategy:
The needs of the customers could be endless for a product, but strategizing the need, prioritizing, and working on an efficient Roadmap is a clear path for a successful product. But it could get tricky if too many needs or inputs are in queue and becomes tough for the Product Manager to add to a product roadmap with limited time and resource availability. Another great difficulty with road mapping is the concern with frequent changes and a low level of predictability. PMs will see their roadmaps being disrupted by unforeseen events and variables.
The first step, in prioritizing your product roadmap is – supporting the hypotheses with data gathered from customers. Meet stakeholders and go through all the current and upcoming project ideas. Once they see how many projects or ideas are available, it can be easier to prioritize based on a realistic amount of time and resources assessing the risks prior to the commitments for a better product strategy.
Prioritizing Product Backlog and regular Backlog grooming aligning to the roadmap:
Customer Driven prioritization would be the efficient method for backlog prioritization. However, there are several methods in place, but going by the needs of the customer and based on the product, sorting, and categorizing the items on the Backlog, tackling the high-priority tasks first, saving less important tasks for later, is a better way to do.
Regular backlog grooming will help in prioritizations, re-prioritizations and aligning with the roadmap. In real, it happens that, certain items on backlog may deviate the alignment with the roadmap, and that would be the right time to identify the next steps to keep stakeholders informed and balance the relationship and plan.
Distancing – Collaborating with teams in Different Time Zones:
This could range from working on the same site in different rooms, to the team separated across continents and time zones, which would lead to including mistrust, miscommunication, misalignment, and slow progress.
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation,” as the Agile Manifesto for Software Development states. But this may not be feasible always, and certain products need to be built collaborating with people in different time zones, and hence we need to work harder to avoid these challenges and achieve significant productivity and increase in morale. If that is not an option, then try to partially collocate people, for example, by spending the first few sprints together and then working in the same office at least once every three months.
Dependencies on collaborations and Risk Assessment:
Certain times, when working on a bundled product, especially involving micro services being developed by different teams across various time zones with different technologies might challenge a PM to re-align the main product with the dependencies on the technical teams, cross-functional teams, stake holders, budgeting, hardware, software, requirements, functionality precedence, customer feedback, etc. PM has no choice but live with it and organize the dependencies strategically and tactfully to reduce complexities, errors, and dissatisfaction keeping up with the shared objectives and so on.
PM must go through the process of risk assessment and add to risks log as per the dependencies. Assign an owner to those risks and decide how to manage them. Such an approach will give a proficient level of transparency and a decent record to plan on the potential issues.
Proxy roles – Means a placeholder for the other roles and responsibilities:
Switching roles in the busy days, quite often turns Off a PM. But, having proxy product manager to compensate for overworked or partial and distant product managers, for instance, a business analyst. A BA, who does most of the product backlog grooming work and answering questions to the team daily, is a proxy to the actual product manager, who in real decides the product backlog prioritisation and accepts or rejects work results at the end of the sprint. Using a proxy is an attempt to superficially treat a systemic issue, but which could be challenging to handle for a PM. Identifying the right proxy and having deeper collaboration with them in every aspect of the product workflow may help overcome the challenges associated.
Diverse culture having multiple product committees with no single owner:
A product committee with a group of product owners and product managers, coming through diverse cultures, without any-one in charge of the overall product, guiding the group, helping to create a common goal, and facilitating decision making could be quite challenging.
The product committee is in danger of getting caught in endless meetings with conflicting interests and politics—something also referred to as “death by committee.” Always ensure that there is one person in charge of the product who guides the other product owners and managers and facilitates decision making, including product backlog prioritisation and release planning etc.
Acceptance and adaption to changes:
Change is a natural phenomenon but accepting the fact and adapting to the changes might be challenging even in required circumstances. Recognize the change and write down the positives that outweigh. Prepare and find a way out to embrace the change and move on by setting new goals, while communicating the concerns, and focusing on what can be controlled will help face these challenges.
Availability of right skilled team:
Product managers play a key role in recruiting, training, and onboarding new team members, and empowering the existing product team to work at their best.
Hire with care and do not make final hiring decisions based solely on remote tests or what happens in an interview. Conduct assignments and work closely with HR or People Operations to make careful hiring decisions for the product team. Consider how potential hires work within the team’s culture by including the current team in the interview or test process.
Think of employee experience as a product. Understand the prior products developed and what the best products attract and retain users. Once hired, design an employee experience to make them feel valued, fulfilled, and empowered which involves offering flexibility and rewards, and appreciating and celebrating their value often.
Conclusion:
At some stage, most product managers will find themselves confronted by most or several of these challenges at once. Considering the challenges as opportunities and tackling the core issues with communication, alignment, and team operations – a PM can empower the team to pull together and respond to roadblocks with agility and grace.
Troubleshooting problems with research, finding solutions to balancing PM’s responsibilities and managing deadlines will enforce to strategize and prioritize what is important that brings in customer and stakeholder satisfaction insights with customer satisfaction being the priority.
Problem-solving is a product manager‘s superpower. Understanding the above challenges, and tackling them head-on, is a path to more effective product management and satisfied users.
Written by:
(Director of Product Management)