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How essential are domain expertise in managing a product?
Image courtesy: Fusion VenturesRecently I asked this question on my LinkedIn feed and yet to get a single reply. I have been pondering over it by myelf for some time. If you recollect the core product management skills preached around, those are hardly specific to a domain or industry.What has been your experience as a contributing product manager, or what have you seen in other product managers around?Like in sales, marketing, or accounting, are product management skills portable across domains and indutrries?Cheers,Ranjit
These things come to my mind:
- Strong business/users understanding: Needs to know not only the users' painpoint and behaviors but also how the product/business actually works to solve their problem. What makes Myntra different from Jabong?
- Ability to solve new problems - at fast pace: What makes companies such as Myntra and Ola challenging is that everyday there can be unique business challenges. One day you are fighting nation wide supplier strikes, next day you are sued by a user for lack of safety. Your product needs to respond while still keeping your committed deadlines. It's a ruthless battle between changing priorities and a PM needs to be strike the right balance without losing time.
- Leadership: Needs to rally the team around a common, well defined set of goals. Needs to represent their product/team well in front of all the different stakeholders and perhaps even "fight" them to do what's right. For example - the Product Manager at Myntra should have fought the decision to go "app-only" a few years ago based on their data and insights about the users.
- Data driven: At such companies, teams are much bigger and there are several teams to coordinate stuff with (such as legal, operations, support and so on). Without clarity on what metrics are important and how they will react to a decision, is important to bring consensus in such environment. As a PM, you often lack official authority. Knowing your numbers gives you that authority.
Some early thoughts, as I said. But enough to start your thought processing going!