With this month’s theme, we're going to go meta and talk about product-managing…yourself. In other words, leveraging your internal customers’ unmet needs to uniquely define your personal brand within your organization (and perhaps industry as well).
Your Customers’ Unmet Needs
Fundamentally, a product manager’s job is to discover and enable their organization to solve unmet needs and problems in their customer base in a way that brings value to their business. This is typically applied to their company’s external customers – but why not the company itself? To try this out, ask yourself:
- What are your organization’s blind spots and challenges?
- What are people around me struggling with in their roles?
- Are there common trends that are pervasive and urgent across the organization?
NOTE: The Pragmatic Marketing devotees amongst us may notice that there is a property missing from the third bullet above, which is ‘that customers would pay to solve’. And that is because they are already paying you to solve it (unless you’re working for free, that is).
Examples of these unmet needs could be: lack of understanding business priorities, inadequate strategic thinking and focus, poor market knowledge, siloed organizational functions, or everyone doing the same things in different ways – to name a few.
If you’re not sure, try using the product management tools you already use on external customers such as interviews, surveys, and your powers of observation.
Identify a few unmet needs that you see consistently throughout the company.
Your Values and Capabilities
The next question to ask yourself is: “Which of these problems can I and do I want to solve?”
Both parts of the question are important; the “Can I?” part is a question of your capabilities, while the “Do I?” part is a decision about what you want to stand for. There may be plenty of problems you can solve, but you might not want to be known for it (I once worked at a company where I was well-known as the guy who knew how to refill the paper towel dispensers without the janitor key. Not a great personal brand).
If you’re not sure what you want to be known for, think about your passion and values. Which of the problems you’ve identified gets you out of bed in the morning? Which do you think about when you’re washing the dishes, out for a walk, or driving to work? (Note: this could be a whole other article as it is not a simple task!)
Similarly, there may be problems you want to solve but do not have the capability to do so; this is also not a recipe for success unless you think you can develop these capabilities quickly. Otherwise, it is a setup for failure.
You Are The Product
By matching up pervasive and urgent unmet needs with your capabilities and values, you become the product to your internal customers. You, and the work you do to address the unmet need, are their solution. So, now you need to make that solution. Here too, you can tap into your product management skills. Brainstorm solutions, prototype, test, iterate, launch. You may be creating a new process, a set of templates or documents, or even introducing a new behavior. It all counts.
And once you’ve launched, don’t forget to self-promote! Because you have now linked yourself to the solution. If you’ve chosen an issue that is pervasive and urgent enough, you’re going to become ‘the person to go to when you need…’ the thing you’ve done. Embrace it – this is now an element of your brand in the company.
And hopefully, you aren’t refilling the paper towel dispensers.
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