Starting with Product Management is hard.

Get yourself prepared to contribute to your team the way you need to.

👇 According to Marty Cagan these are four things:

1. Know your customers.

Product Managers have to become the experts for users and customers.

They need to invest the time to really get up close and personal to ensure that they get the relevant information first-hand.

2. Know your data.

That’s another layer of knowing your customer, but more specific:

To find out how your product is being used, ask:

• What’s the user analytics?

• What’s the sales analytics?
• How is the change over time?

3.1. Know the different parts of your business.

You have to know:

• How your product is marketed, sold, paid for, monetizes.
• What are compliance, regulatory, privacy, security issues?

Your stakeholders will judge you on these.

So you have to build trust! …

3.2. How do you build trust with your stakeholders?

You have to convince them that …

• you understand the different parts of your business and

• you will bring them a prototype that they can see and make sure it’s okay, whenever there’s a question.

4. Know your market.

Find out about the …

• competitive landscape,

• industry,

• trends. 👉 Cagan considers these one of the “fun ones”. There are good people in the industry you can follow on these topics.

So those are the four things PMs should bring to the team:

1- Knowing your customers.

2- Knowing your data.

3- Knowing the parts of your business.

4- Knowing your market.

So … your team wants to come up with great solutions?

They’ll need somebody on the team that brings knowledge about customers, data, business and market.

And that somebody is you as product manager.

These were excerpts from Lenny’s podcast with Lenny Rachitsky and Marty Cagan.

If I started as a PM today, I’d listen to this thing three times in a row. (I did.)

Go listen to it here:

https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-nature-of-product-marty-cagan-silicon-valley-product-group/