#mypersonalsuccessfactors
Are you in the software business in a product-related role, such as a Product Manager, Product Owner, UX designer, or UI designer? If so, do you know your products? How well do you know them?
For me, it is crucial to know my products by heart and understand the portfolio of my company at a good level.
What does knowing my products mean?
For me, it means having hands-on experience and not just quoting marketing “blabla.” Ideally, you should have several test environments available. First, you should have access to the released software state that your customers use. Besides, you should have access to a consolidated development state where you can test new features. Ideally, you have good test data and configurations available and know all your processes. You can set them up and demo them quickly, e.g., to verify specific aspects for an upcoming feature.
In my career, I encountered several professionals in product-related roles who did not know their product at all or not well enough. How can you define or lead a product without knowing it? It is simply impossible! It was always challenging to work efficiently with such individuals as I needed to explain things repeatedly. Furthermore, they defined things inconsistently with what was already there, and instead of using existing interaction patterns, they introduced new ones, creating inconsistencies. Overall, there was a lot of friction, and we were not as fast, and the outcome was not as good as I wished. This is what happens when you don’t know your products.
Know your competition
And then there is the competition. Do you know your competitors and similar software products?
Defining a fabulous product has a lot to do with knowing the bigger context, understanding how others were solving similar issues. Seeing good and bad things can heavily inspire you. You can build on top of good ideas and even improve them. Seeing and identifying bad things helps you avoid errors others made.
Curiosity and euphoria
Knowing your products, competitors, and similar products have a lot to do with curiosity and euphoria about the product. If you are in a product-related role and do not feel this curiosity and euphoria about your products, then you should ask yourself whether you are in the right place and try to find a way to develop these characteristics.
If you are a manager hiring product-related roles, then I can only recommend you watch out for people who have this curiosity and passion.
How can companies help
But it’s not only the employees that need to act. Companies have to support their employees in developing these characteristics. As a company, you have to make it easy for your employees to get to know your products and test them daily. It all starts with the onboarding to a new company. Demo and introduce your products to your new employees. Let them test on their own as early as possible. Show them how and where they can test your products and provide them with documentation to learn your products and your business.
I worked for companies in the past where this was done extremely well. Avira was one of those. A few weeks after I joined, I participated in the new employee onboarding, and part of this multi-day session was an introduction to all the products of the company, including live demos. On another day, we were invited to the test laboratory and were asked to install the products on a test machine and play around with them. Being a B2C company, it was, of course, easy to test the products, even on a private machine, and use the products on a day-to-day basis.
Drink your own champagne
If you are responsible for a product that you can use productively in your daily life, then do it! Using your product daily puts you into the shoes of a real customer, and you witness things more from a realistic perspective. Lots of companies spend a lot of time and money on long-running tests simulating real customer situations. If you are actively using your products, you do something very similar. You have a life view of what is currently going on outside. The more colleagues do this, the better. At Avira, we detected quite a few problems which we overlooked during regular release testing.
Product demos
Another very helpful practice a company can do is running regular product demos where every team gets the chance to demonstrate their new features to the whole company. This helps everyone in the company to get to know the products better and it is a nice learning experience for the presenters to prepare the demo and to present in front of a large audience.
Summary
- Know your products, be euphoric about them
- Regularly test your products
- Also look at your competitors and similar products. Build on top of good ideas and avoid errors.
- Ensure educating all new and existing employees about your products and business
- Ensure setting up a test environment where everyone can easily access and set up and run tests on their own
- If your company develops B2C products, use them on a daily basis and encourage your whole company to act as life tester