I can’t believe it’s been more than ten years since I first became a product manager. Since then, I’ve been on a “hybrid career” journey, and have worked in a lot of different related areas over the past several years including product marketing, competitive intelligence, developer relations, customer education, and technical content development, all while playing both individual contributor and leadership roles.

For me, though, it’s been sort of a “once a product manager, always a product manager” situation through all of it. Actually, I have brought the things I learned from product management into just about everything I’ve done, even outside of my career. Thinking about things from a user perspective, creating a closed feedback loop, working iteratively, failing fast, and staying agile (and sometimes Agile), are all strategies that can be applied successfully in quite a few different areas. Why is that?

Everything is product. (That’s why.) Except many companies, including some that I have worked for unfortunately, only consider products to be those tangible items or software applications that directly generate revenue. If you have ever been stuck in that situation, you understand my frustration. Thankfully I’ve seen the other side of the story as well. The best companies and leadership teams have a broader perspective, recognizing that everything with users should be considered a product, regardless of its primary function or revenue-generating potential.

Redefining Product

A product, at its core, is something that provides value to its users. By this definition, many aspects of a business that might not traditionally be viewed as products actually fit the bill.

Internal tools and processes

Your employees are customers too! Just because a particular application is only used within the context of doing business doesn’t mean it shouldn’t consider the needs of those users. A company’s culture should reflect its attitude toward customers. If it doesn’t care about its own internal users, why should customers trust it to care about them?

Customer support systems

Anything your customers interact with is a product, even those adjacent tools that might not be part of the primary product you are selling. This includes ticketing applications, automated phone trees, email notifications, and any other experiences that support the customer along the way. These are part of the overall customer experience, so you may not be thinking of it as a product, but the users certainly are.

Company websites and documentation

A website is a product! This is especially true if it’s a user portal or a documentation or reference site. Your core products are an extension of your brand. If the customer’s interaction with your branded content is subpar, they will view all of your products that way.

Driving Value with a User-Centric Approach

In case it isn’t clear already, the reason for viewing everything as a product is that it allows the adoption of a more user-centric approach. This shift in mindset can lead to significant improvements across all areas of a business:

• Enhanced user experience: By treating internal tools and supporting systems as products, we focus on making them more intuitive and efficient for users.
• Better customer satisfaction: When every touchpoint is treated as a product, the overall customer journey improves.
• Continuous improvement: Perhaps most importantly, the product mindset encourages regular updates and iterations based on user feedback.

I can hear those revenue-obsessed executives now. “Why does this matter?” I understand the thinking. There’s no company without revenue. But if a company is only focused on this metric, they are missing the hidden value of non-revenue products that are created in less obvious ways:

• Customer retention: Well-designed products improve satisfaction and reduce churn. (Internally, this also means employee retention and reduced turnover.)
• Brand perception: User-friendly websites and documentation enhance brand image and indirectly drive sales.
• Operational efficiency: Internal tools treated as products can significantly reduce costs and improve productivity.

Adopting the "Everything is Product" Mindset

Changing your mindset to think about everything as product doesn’t mean you have to be completely capital-A Agile and go full-fledged SAFe or Scrum when building your company website. You can if it fits the situation, but all you really need to do is think (and plan) like a product manager.

To implement this approach effectively, you have to start by identifying and understanding your users, like any good product manager does. Once you know who they are, then you can gather feedback from them regularly and analyze user feedback accordingly. This is where product analytics tools can come in handy for quantitative metrics, and many of these tools now even have ways to gather qualitative input as well through surveys or ratings features.

With this feedback comes (hopefully) a closed loop of iteration and improvement. Use the feedback to continuously enhance and update the product. (If we keep calling it a product, maybe it will eventually become one.) Bonus points for measuring success with KPIs to track the performance and value. Then you can show your bosses how valuable this non-revenue generating thing actually is.

Conclusion

Truthfully, I’m kind of annoyed that I even felt I had to write this. This concept of everything being a product has become so apparent to me, so blatantly obvious, that I found myself in disbelief the last time was told that it wasn’t the case in a particular situation. Watching a once great and valuable product that was loved by customers be gutted and replaced by cumbersome templated muck was painful. But it did help clarify what kinds of leaders and companies I’d be happy working for.

I want an environment where leadership embraces the "Everything is Product" philosophy. That way the business can unlock hidden potential, improve user satisfaction across the board, and create a culture of continuous improvement.

If it has users, it's a product - and it deserves the same level of attention, design thinking, and iterative improvement as any flagship offering.

It's been three weeks since I began my Product Manager position at CenturyLink Cloud, and it's been a great experience so far. I've learned so much already and am really enjoying my continuing journey from the enterprise IT world into the cloud computing space.

The most frequent question I've gotten from all of my family and friends since I took this job has been, "So...what do you do?" Of course, when I was working in IT at my previous job, my answer was often just, "I work with computers." I imagine they pictured me helping people fix their computer problems like Jimmy Fallon's Nick Burns character from SNL. With this new job, it seems to have become even harder to describe what it is that I do as it seems people often have no idea what the "Cloud" really is or what a product manager does. In fact, even when I accepted the position, I had only a rough idea of how exactly I'd be spending my time on a daily basis. Thankfully, it hasn't taken me too long to figure out. While I was up in Seattle meeting the team last week, we had a very productive discussion about precisely this topic.

As product managers, what exactly do we need to know and what are we actually responsible for doing? First, it's important to understand what we need to know to be an effective product manager, and we learned that there are three key areas of knowledge: product, market, and accounts.

What a Product Manager Knows

Product. Of course, product managers need to know all about their product. I mean, it's in their title — if we don't know the details of the product we are managing, we can't rightfully be called a product manager. This means we have to be intimately familiar with all of the features of the product, including how they work and how to use them, as well as why they were designed a particular way. It also means we need to have some sense of the product roadmap, ultimately being aware of what features are on the near-term horizon as well as at least a broad understanding of where the product is headed over the long term. In the case of our team, this includes all products in our portfolio (though I've heard some teams have product managers assigned to individual features or to one specific product within a portfolio).

Market. In order to help us develop our product roadmap and also better understand how our features compare with those of our competitors, we have to stay aware of what's out there in market, what the industry trends are, and where there are gaps, both in our product and in the market in general. For our team, this means keeping up with all the news that's out there about cloud computing — competitor press releases, thought leaders blogs, research articles, white papers, presentations, anything that will let us gain insight into who is doing what with cloud services and where the technology is headed. This means reading...a lot. I've already discovered that consuming so much content and determining what is important to retain can be pretty overwhelming. Luckily, I've found that using services like Pocket, Flipboard, Feedly, and Evernote really help me to track lots of information, glean what's important, and save it for reference.

Accounts. While it's helpful to see what our competitors and others in the market are doing, there is perhaps nothing more valuable than understanding what our customers are doing with our product(s). Keeping up with the end users is an important part of a product manager's job. Having regular calls or meetings and just maintaining a positive and open relationship with users is a great way to do this. While end users will likely have a relationship and regular interactions with a sales representative or account manager, making sure their channels of communication are open with the product management team as well can make a big difference here. I think this is probably the most challenging of the three knowledge areas to keep up with because it requires such active participation and frequent communication with end users.

Okay, so a product manager has to know a lot...now what do we do with all of this information?

What a Product Manager Does

In general, a product manager does a lot of information sharing. All of that knowledge we have about the product, market, and accounts, we have to share with various audiences who are interested and need the information to do their jobs. This includes internal evangelism where we need to help others in our organization understand what our products are, how they work, how they are evolving, and why we are (or aren't) building a particular feature. It also includes public engagement as well — talking about our product, or even our industry in general, on social media, in publications, and at conferences. It's about promoting the product both within the company as well as to the broader community, and since we know the product better than anybody else, what its place is in the market, and how our customers are using it, we are often in the best position to do this.

What I've found most interesting about the product manager role is that it seems to sit right in the middle of so many key functions within an organization. In the case of our team, we are part of Engineering and already work closely with the developers, but we also have to interface very frequently with Operations, Marketing, Sales, and even the end users. Ultimately, all of these various groups are our customers. In order to help gain all of that knowledge we need, we need to interact with all of them and keep them engaged and as happy as possible. This can prove to be a difficult task, of course, given all of the competing priorities.

Given that we sit in Engineering, perhaps our most important job functions include backlog management and sprint planning. It is the product management team who is primarily responsible for determining if we are going to build a feature, and when we are going to build it. In other words, it doesn't get into the product unless we say it does. Of course, we look to all of our customers to help us make the determination, but the decision is essentially ours.This may result in some healthy debate as part of the planning process, and so it helps to be armed with facts (what we know) to support these decisions. If a developer is curious about why we have to build a feature, it helps if we can say something like "all of our competitors are doing it" or "our top five clients asked for it." Conversely, if an end user asks why we don't have a feature, it's nice to be able to say "we are working to get it into the product soon" or "we will never be able to support that because it doesn't fit with our vision of the product" or even "have you thought of using this other feature instead to accomplish the same thing?" Sometimes we may even do some feature prototyping first to help understand what to build and how it might work.

Along with our engineering team, we need to support our sales and marketing folks as well. We may do some more thorough competitive analysis, not only to help us determine what to put into the product, but also to help them better understand our specific value proposition or what the differences are among the feature sets in the market. In the case of our team, we are also tasked with product definition as well as potentially helping to determine product pricing. This means that we have to work with Finance, Operations, Engineering, and others to find out what it will take to add products to our portfolio so we can figure out the specific details of what the product will look like when it goes to market (i.e. what are specifications, prices, features, value proposition, etc.) Additionally, we may be called upon to help with sales support if there is a need for some deeper technical knowledge to help win over a potential customer. It also falls upon the product managers to take responsibility for analyst briefings and make sure they have all the information they need to accurately reflect the product offerings in their research papers and market analysis. (CenturyLink Cloud was recently recognized by Gartner in the Magic Quadrant for Infrastructure as a Service.)

Finally, let's not forget that there is also the need to continually engage with the end users, not only so we can gain insight into how they are using the product and what features they are interested in, but also to keep them informed on what's coming, as well as helping them get as much as they possibly can out of the product. This can be achieved by writing release notes, knowledge base articles, and keeping them up to date with customer briefings.

One thing I've heard from multiple people is that being a product manager is hard. I'm definitely starting to see why, as there is so much to know and so many decisions to make that have a real impact on all of our customers. I'm up for the challenge, though, and excited to continue to learn and develop all the skills and knowledge necessary to be a great product manager and contributing member of our product team.