Where do you get your ideas as a Product Manager?

Product managers are often stereotyped as the ideas people. As a product manager you have to constantly evolve your product to stay ahead in the game. But how do you do that ?

Most often people (sometimes even within the company) think product managers are the people who go sit at their desk, browse the internet for some inspiration and draw sketches for the new ideas that the company would potentially take up. But that’s not real product people build upon their products.

More than thinking a product manager has to be a good listener, a black-box who can potentially absorb feedback for the product from all sources. The key thing here is taking in all the feedbacks, suggestions and feature requests and look THROUGH them. As a PM, you need to look at the crux of these feedbacks lie, you need to be able to deduce the real pain-point behind them rather than swallow in the information how it comes and act on it. This is critical as you would only always have a very limited and specific set for resources i.e your team of engineers and designer. This is one of the key constraint most product managers at startups will have, therefore you need to be very sure how might you put your developers and designers time to use. (More on resource optimization soon)

As a product manager you shall receive feedback from FOUR primary sources; remembered by the acronym EMUC.

Employees
These are the ideas that come from your co-workers, your management and of-course yourself. Employees usually talk to the users at all levels based on their area of engagement be it operations, business development, customer support or sales.

Metrics
These are the ideas or insights you deduce when you observe the data for the product. For example, you may be looking at the data for the user-onboarding flow and it might be the case the users are skipping the tutorial. In such scenarios you might need to re-think the tutorial and identify why might the users be skipping them. Probably its to information intensive and requires too much effort and time.

Users
You may also get feedback from users who are using your product. For this you must setup and keep an eye on all the feedback loops your company might have, such as Google Playstore for app reviews, or your feedback mailbox where your users may reach out directly and even your customer support team, who may interact with the users directly and relay their feedback to you.

Clients
This is a special scenario and usually applicable for B2B products where your customers may not always be the users of the app. In this case you might receive feedbacks from your clients who may either be again relaying feedback from their users or would like to extend or add certain functionalities to the product.

Remember the acronym EMUC.

Remember a true product person always believes in taking feedbacks and listens to the user of the product, this essential in identifying the pain points the users might face and then innovate and ideate to address them.