Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

3 Conversations that will immediately level-up a PM

Information, understanding and insights are the currency of a good PM. Being in the know, knowing the facts, and being able to reference real customer feedback is the easiest way to stand out and nudge conversations towards value delivery and away from strong internal opinions.

Here are 3 conversations that you should have (or be part of) to help give you this edge:

1. Ask a developer to draw your stack.
   Knowing how your system works and how all the services, servers and apps connect at a systems level is critical. It helps you understand the technical constraints and limitations while also knowing when to pushback or how to propose solutions that actually work. You don’t need to know all the details of how they all work, but at least knowing how it all fits together will go a long way. It’s also a great way of getting more respect from your dev team and fostering tighter relationships with them as you can relate to their work. (This is also one of my tips to become more technical without learning to code, read more here.)
2. Ask someone in finance to talk you though how the company measures unit economics for your product.
   A PM’s job, according to Marty Cagan, is to focus on Value and Viability. You quite simply can’t know viability if you don’t understand how your product captures value for the business — i.e. how you make money off it. That means you need to chat with someone in your finance team to run you thought how they allocate costs to calculate COGS, what revenue is actually generated, and what influences or discounts reduce that. You need to understand how the business thinks about the core unit economics for your product and how it fits into the the revenue across the org. Go to the source.
3. Sit in on sales / customer support calls.
   The first part of ‘Value and Viability’ is how you’re delivering value to customers and how they perceive the way that you solve their problem. You have to get this directly from the mouth of the customer. You should get summary and quantitative data through personas, summaries or reports. But nothing replaces the richness of qualitative comments directly from a customer. Bonus is if you can pop in a few questions to dig deeper on key insights as sales and support are often discussing symptoms not causes.

The best definition I have for the role of a PM is: to deliver value to customers in a way that adds value to the business, while understanding technical constraints.

If you’re not having these 3 conversations then I don’t know how you can claim to do that. So, what are you waiting for?