Transition from Business Analyst to Product Manager

I have spent almost 6 years working as a typical business analyst, and when I transitioned to a product manager role 2 years ago, there were a lot of ‘cultural shocks’ and mindset changes that I had to adjust myself towards, with which I have grown so much from this paradigm shifts.

As a business analyst, my main responsiblity is to gather and refine client requirements to then translate business language into technical function specifications for developers to implement the features, as well as getting involved in testing and demo stages. Although I kept challenging client’s requirements, de-solutioning their requests, getting to the bottom of the real problem and conducting deep data analysis, I wasn’t particularly aware of the product oriented concept or running analysis with a product strategy in mind. Doer, not a thinker is what i would describe for those years of being a business analyst.

Only until I transitioned to a junior product manager role, I started embracing an entire mindset shift that has proved to be more value-inducing, user centric and scalable & strategic. Now, that does not mean business analyst role is worse than PM, it is just these two share some transferrable skills but are fundamentally in charge of different scopes of a problem.

Let’s talk about PRODUCT

Product concept has become a popular topic since about 10 years ago and more and more organisations are adopting product oriented operating models. Why? Simply because it enables the whole organisation to focus on delivering real value to customers, optimising user experience and shortern the journey from development to shipping the final products. It also allows companies to build iterative products and continue creating new values for existing products. It is not merely a product manager’s job to think in a producty way, but the whole company’s responsibility to think in a producty way and ensure everyone delivers their work with the same vision.

Picture from https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/product/product-concept/

What is Product Sense?

Imagine if you are the end user of an app or a service, you judge the product purely from user perspective where you look at how sleek the interface is, how smooth the user journey is, how clear it is for you to know where to click when you want to conduct certain actions, you pay attention to the upgrade of the app, different subscription plans and most importantly, whether it helps you to achieve the result you want to achieve.

When we say Product, it almost assimilates the process of building a physical product such as a smart phone.

• Start with some user research and idea development: who is your target audience? What is the problem that they are facing? What is the existing product they are using now and where is the gap?
• Think about a particular problem that you want to solve and gather some initial user feedbacks: Do we want to focus on building a smart phone with the best camera, or a smart phone that is designed for mobile gamers, or a smart phone that focuses on privacy and security
• After defining the outcome / value, you can start building a proof of concept with some high level sketch of how this phone will look like, hardware it will use and some key functions. It always helps when you add certain personas in and think about how you want users to use this smart phone and map out user journeys
• The KEY here is to think about how your product will evolve to in 5–10 years. It is not a one-off static end product, it is an ever changing, evolving service that can deliver constant values to customers in long term. Build in a short term, medium and long term product vision even before you start implementing it!
• Product sense sometimes does not come with instinct, it has a lot of data analysis and market research as backing. Make data driven decisions on which feature to prioritse and measure the performance of each feature to evaluate whether or not a proposed function is worth investing time in
• Focus on the value! We might easily get distracted by a million fancy functions and interfaces but what really matters to the end user is whether the product allows them to achieve what they want to do. Does this smart phone allow them to take HD videos? Is it compatible with all mobile games ? Does it protect your data and information all the time? The single, unique piece of concrete value is what we should be working towards through the whole end to end process

From MahipSinh.ca: https://www.launchnotes.com/blog/the-power-of-the-product-mindset-unlocking-success-in-business

Now, how to build a Product Mindset?

From my early PM experience, there a few tricks you can start exercising in your daily work to nurtue a product mindset and differentiate yourself from other peers and ultimately help companies to launch a product more effectively:

1.Think about ‘Why’: don’t just act like an executor, be a thinker and challenger. Utilise your critical thinking to always question why we are building this product and what is the key value it is bringing? Why are we implementing certain features and whether these features can indeed help to achieve results? Think thoroughly before investing in resources and time, and make sure the scope of the product is crystal clear. Are we building an MVP, POC or end state product?

2.Build a long term product roadmap and prioritise: Every product has a life cycle and a good product should aim to achieve max lifetime value from a customer. If you want to build a sustainable product, you need to prepare a long term product plan too. Think about what long term value you want this product to ship and break that down into short, medium and long term roadmap with milestones. Consider all the key features that are needed in order to generate these values and prioritise them in a logical way so that UI/UX, developer and marketing teams can all follow in order to unlock values by certain sequences. Prioritise features considering the complexity, implementation implication, impact and resources.

3.Be integrative: A product has front end, back end, components, data and all other wrappings around it, you will have to comprehend all the knowledge about this product and know inside out to then integrate all aspects to come up with certain decisions. Particularly as a PM, you are acting as a pivot to navigate all teams around you towards that single piece of common value, you will need to be highly integrative and factor in all considerations from dfferent teams to remove blockers of delivering the product.

4.Be scalable: First principle is always to build re-usable component ! Do not think about what your product will look like if you have 50 users, think about what it should look like when it has 1000, or 10000 users. Can you grow your users organically with the current infrastructure? Is the product flexible enough to cater for future use cases? Is it easy to maintain large amount of users on your product? Is the platform robust enough to host more users? Can you drag and drop re-usable components to build new workflows easily? No scalability, no growth.

5.Customer centric: Put yourself into your customer’s shoes, simulate the user journey and test the product thoroughly. Ensure you have frequent testing and demos to clients so that their feedbacks can be captured in an agile way. Customer satisfaction is the soul of the product and a product is not a product without realising customer benefits.

Hopefully my early PM experiences and thoughts can inspire you and navigate you through a lot of product ambiguities. It is not easy to step out of daily work and think of the bigger product picture but it is indeed the North star of everything we are doing to ship a customer friendly and sustainable product.

Written by Jana Yeung