What should be the product manager. One opinion from Yandex
This summer, Yandex will host the seventh School of Managers . Every year several hundred people apply for participation in it. Most of them have a lot of questions about what a manager’s job in Yandex is and what needs to be done in order to be a good manager.
Many of you are familiar with the traditional approach with the separation of project managers and products. In Yandex, there is often no such separation, and you will most likely need the knowledge and skills of both specializations in your work. The role of the manager is constantly evolving. Companies and services are growing, processes are changing - all this entails a constant rethinking of this role. In such conditions, there is a constant risk that it will become an obscure entity. Only constant reflection on what and how a manager should do can save from this.
')
It is important not to forget that the manager is not a position in the work book, but a role in a team. Most often, disputes arise around the product component of the manager’s work. It is important that the whole team understand what this work is about.
There are very clear roles in our industry. For example, a programmer-developer. He basically writes code on a common programming language on a computer. Using the version control system makes its code become part of a common repository. This code is syntactically correct (compiled without errors if it is C ++) and, if it is run, it works and does something that can be explained to the manager. If a programmer fails to do this, then it will be very, very difficult not to be dismissed.
Product Manager less understood role. Sometimes I suspect that the requirements for them are not fixed and not well known even at the level of abstraction applied in the paragraph above. At the same time, the word “product” and phrases based on it are often used either as an element of bulshit-bingo, or as a magic card “sim I win the argument”. This is bad. The phrase “according to grocery vision” should not be synonymous with “I decided that because I can.” “In the course of grocery work” should not mean “my colleague and I sat and thought a little”. This practice is not only slightly detrimental to the cause, but also very contagious - because everyone wants to have a special product magic!
I would like to say that all these words really mean what standards and practices are needed to make awesome, amazing products.
First, a little about the meaning of the word "work", and then there is a suspicion that inflation has happened to it (as with the words "unique", "expert" or "amazing"). Work is what a person does regularly, (at least) eight hours a day, five days a week, something that he gets tired of, something that he wants to go on vacation and relax there. The work contains some repetitive, routine elements. The work can be largely formalized, otherwise it is called art. At the same time, it cannot be formalized completely, otherwise it is more correct to automate or entrust the toloker. As a result of the work, real artifacts appear regularly; they can be seen, read, “felt”. These artifacts are of high quality and low quality, and this is an objective characteristic. A professional at work produces better quality artifacts than an amateur in his spare time.
“Food work” is work. The product manager regularly and routinely does something that makes the final product better. In my picture of the world, he does the following.
Continuously uses its product and competitors' products. Avito's product does not just use its website, Yula, Aliexpress, etc., it regularly and truly buys any unknown things such as Lego designers, antique jewelry boxes and lace scarves. Product Spotify can be seen without headphones only if it communicates with real people right here and now. The person who does the search for Yandex is obliged to search for everything in the world: in Yandex, Google, Bing and even in Baidu, on phones, tablets and laptops, at home, at work, in the subway and at the airport. Competent product - a fan of his share and those scenarios that are solved with its help. There is a famous business story (I retell it from memory, I can lie in the details) about how European companies repeatedly broke off and suffered losses trying to produce a seemingly simple household appliance: a rice cooker. They developed them, produced, advertised and distributed, all as with kettles and washing machines, but then something went wrong, no one bought them. Alas for them, the rice cooker can be designed only by a person who eats rice daily, who prepares it every day for himself, for his family and on special occasions for a group of friends, who not only can cook rice in different ways, but also considers it sensible and appropriate. In Europe, these were not. If someone from the developers should “open” the product to the fact that the competitors have made such a feature not in the way we do, and the product does not have a ready answer to why we are better, then In my opinion, a major failure.
He regularly conducts playtest, tests his and other people's products on other people. I do not specifically call it “UX testing”, because this term in many large companies, including Yandex, means a very specific time-consuming research method, which is far from the only possible, and even not always, the most correct one. If you get to full-fledged UX only once every few weeks, catch colleagues in the corridor and ask you to spend 15 minutes on you. Torment your grandmother or husband. And if the icon of the mobile application of the project on the launch day causes a stir in the Internet with its similarity to any part of the body, and for the team this is a surprise, it was not intended, then this is a product failure, and not someone else's.
Constantly and in details tells all the team members and customers about what they actually do. If someone in the team does not know why this or that feature, and how people will use it, or knows, but does not believe in it, this is a product problem. Therefore, the product is difficult to be an introvert. Product introverts will have to write multi-letters in all channels: in the mail in person and in mailing lists, in tickets, internal social networks, in instant messengers, in wikis. An extrovert will also have to write a lot, but the introvert is even more. The product, which cannot write competently and clearly in Russian, is incompetent so far, but, fortunately, it is easy to write Russian clearly, our language is rich and powerful, and constant practice quickly compensates for any initial lag.
Hardest of all in the team for the quality of the quality, in all details and aspects. Including if the product brakes, bazhit, zapamlen, etc. Often, the product does not have direct levers of influence on developers and subcontractors, so this will require the manifestation of social skills and personal emotional involvement, even theatricality. Product completely sincerely uses words like “awesome” and “shame”. He can say: “It’s impossible, we all get fired,” so that they believe him. He grabs his heart if he hears from the developer or designer statements in the spirit of "and so it will come down." He is not even afraid (even!) To exaggerate his superiors, or to demand to cancel the release (unimaginable!), If the rest does not work. Do not be afraid to appear too ill for your work, it is impossible to do “too much”. Absolute failure, if the product, say, passes the design to the designer, takes the result through the sprint, and answers the questions that "the designers have decided so." Or put up with the fact that the main page of the wifi service is loaded for a few seconds without constantly kicking about it. Or he knows that competitors have a better product, and they feel comfortable about it. Or, in response to the question “Why do I have such results?” Answers: “Machine learning decided so.” Or connected to the project a kind of “black box” (for example, on the basis of someone else's API or in general, it is scary to say Formula Trained by CatBoost), without checking the results of his work “for sanity” from and to. Do not do it this way.
Understands which features are “cheap” and which are “expensive”, generates and sorts their Wishlist by the price / quality ratio. If competitors are launching something, after which the product has the question “what was it possible?”, Then this is not “no one warned him,” it is his personal failure. If someone in the team has nothing to do at least at some point in time, this is also his failure. And if he doesn’t know how much it will be worth making X at least up to the order, but he wants to do exactly X, too.
***
Want to learn more about the work of managers - come to our YouTube channel “Project Management” . And if you want to participate in the summer school, you can leave a preliminary application - and be the first to know about the start of the set.
Many of you are familiar with the traditional approach with the separation of project managers and products. In Yandex, there is often no such separation, and you will most likely need the knowledge and skills of both specializations in your work. The role of the manager is constantly evolving. Companies and services are growing, processes are changing - all this entails a constant rethinking of this role. In such conditions, there is a constant risk that it will become an obscure entity. Only constant reflection on what and how a manager should do can save from this.
')
It is important not to forget that the manager is not a position in the work book, but a role in a team. Most often, disputes arise around the product component of the manager’s work. It is important that the whole team understand what this work is about.
There are very clear roles in our industry. For example, a programmer-developer. He basically writes code on a common programming language on a computer. Using the version control system makes its code become part of a common repository. This code is syntactically correct (compiled without errors if it is C ++) and, if it is run, it works and does something that can be explained to the manager. If a programmer fails to do this, then it will be very, very difficult not to be dismissed.
Product Manager less understood role. Sometimes I suspect that the requirements for them are not fixed and not well known even at the level of abstraction applied in the paragraph above. At the same time, the word “product” and phrases based on it are often used either as an element of bulshit-bingo, or as a magic card “sim I win the argument”. This is bad. The phrase “according to grocery vision” should not be synonymous with “I decided that because I can.” “In the course of grocery work” should not mean “my colleague and I sat and thought a little”. This practice is not only slightly detrimental to the cause, but also very contagious - because everyone wants to have a special product magic!
I would like to say that all these words really mean what standards and practices are needed to make awesome, amazing products.
First, a little about the meaning of the word "work", and then there is a suspicion that inflation has happened to it (as with the words "unique", "expert" or "amazing"). Work is what a person does regularly, (at least) eight hours a day, five days a week, something that he gets tired of, something that he wants to go on vacation and relax there. The work contains some repetitive, routine elements. The work can be largely formalized, otherwise it is called art. At the same time, it cannot be formalized completely, otherwise it is more correct to automate or entrust the toloker. As a result of the work, real artifacts appear regularly; they can be seen, read, “felt”. These artifacts are of high quality and low quality, and this is an objective characteristic. A professional at work produces better quality artifacts than an amateur in his spare time.
“Food work” is work. The product manager regularly and routinely does something that makes the final product better. In my picture of the world, he does the following.
Continuously uses its product and competitors' products. Avito's product does not just use its website, Yula, Aliexpress, etc., it regularly and truly buys any unknown things such as Lego designers, antique jewelry boxes and lace scarves. Product Spotify can be seen without headphones only if it communicates with real people right here and now. The person who does the search for Yandex is obliged to search for everything in the world: in Yandex, Google, Bing and even in Baidu, on phones, tablets and laptops, at home, at work, in the subway and at the airport. Competent product - a fan of his share and those scenarios that are solved with its help. There is a famous business story (I retell it from memory, I can lie in the details) about how European companies repeatedly broke off and suffered losses trying to produce a seemingly simple household appliance: a rice cooker. They developed them, produced, advertised and distributed, all as with kettles and washing machines, but then something went wrong, no one bought them. Alas for them, the rice cooker can be designed only by a person who eats rice daily, who prepares it every day for himself, for his family and on special occasions for a group of friends, who not only can cook rice in different ways, but also considers it sensible and appropriate. In Europe, these were not. If someone from the developers should “open” the product to the fact that the competitors have made such a feature not in the way we do, and the product does not have a ready answer to why we are better, then In my opinion, a major failure.
He regularly conducts playtest, tests his and other people's products on other people. I do not specifically call it “UX testing”, because this term in many large companies, including Yandex, means a very specific time-consuming research method, which is far from the only possible, and even not always, the most correct one. If you get to full-fledged UX only once every few weeks, catch colleagues in the corridor and ask you to spend 15 minutes on you. Torment your grandmother or husband. And if the icon of the mobile application of the project on the launch day causes a stir in the Internet with its similarity to any part of the body, and for the team this is a surprise, it was not intended, then this is a product failure, and not someone else's.
Constantly and in details tells all the team members and customers about what they actually do. If someone in the team does not know why this or that feature, and how people will use it, or knows, but does not believe in it, this is a product problem. Therefore, the product is difficult to be an introvert. Product introverts will have to write multi-letters in all channels: in the mail in person and in mailing lists, in tickets, internal social networks, in instant messengers, in wikis. An extrovert will also have to write a lot, but the introvert is even more. The product, which cannot write competently and clearly in Russian, is incompetent so far, but, fortunately, it is easy to write Russian clearly, our language is rich and powerful, and constant practice quickly compensates for any initial lag.
Hardest of all in the team for the quality of the quality, in all details and aspects. Including if the product brakes, bazhit, zapamlen, etc. Often, the product does not have direct levers of influence on developers and subcontractors, so this will require the manifestation of social skills and personal emotional involvement, even theatricality. Product completely sincerely uses words like “awesome” and “shame”. He can say: “It’s impossible, we all get fired,” so that they believe him. He grabs his heart if he hears from the developer or designer statements in the spirit of "and so it will come down." He is not even afraid (even!) To exaggerate his superiors, or to demand to cancel the release (unimaginable!), If the rest does not work. Do not be afraid to appear too ill for your work, it is impossible to do “too much”. Absolute failure, if the product, say, passes the design to the designer, takes the result through the sprint, and answers the questions that "the designers have decided so." Or put up with the fact that the main page of the wifi service is loaded for a few seconds without constantly kicking about it. Or he knows that competitors have a better product, and they feel comfortable about it. Or, in response to the question “Why do I have such results?” Answers: “Machine learning decided so.” Or connected to the project a kind of “black box” (for example, on the basis of someone else's API or in general, it is scary to say Formula Trained by CatBoost), without checking the results of his work “for sanity” from and to. Do not do it this way.
Understands which features are “cheap” and which are “expensive”, generates and sorts their Wishlist by the price / quality ratio. If competitors are launching something, after which the product has the question “what was it possible?”, Then this is not “no one warned him,” it is his personal failure. If someone in the team has nothing to do at least at some point in time, this is also his failure. And if he doesn’t know how much it will be worth making X at least up to the order, but he wants to do exactly X, too.
***
Want to learn more about the work of managers - come to our YouTube channel “Project Management” . And if you want to participate in the summer school, you can leave a preliminary application - and be the first to know about the start of the set.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/351208/
All Articles