Sometimes being a product manager can feel like being on Survivor, and worrying about your product team voting you out at the next product council.

Product management is hard. Leading a product team is hard. You make countless decisions, and not all of them will be good decisions. Every product manager has occasional rough days; days where you’re stuck on a particularly difficult problem, or disappointed with your product’s progress, or in a decision you made, or maybe frustrated with the internal workings of your company. There are plenty of reasons for tough days.

It can be especially tough on you because as the product manager, the product team is looking to you for leadership, and watching your behavior and reactions closely, so you can’t just wear your emotions on your sleeve. So what do you do to get through those tough days?

When I get stuck or have trouble getting where I need to be, there are a set of things I do to try to break through. I present them here in the hope that they might prove useful to you as well:

- Review your product principles – you should always have your product principles handy – the set of prioritized principles that you use as a guide for evaluating the many decisions you are faced with. Take a fresh look at them. How closely has your recent product efforts aligned with these principles? If there’s a mismatch – are your principles out of date or have you let the product stray off course?

- Take a fresh look at the data – hopefully you collect plenty of data on your product’s use. You can always learn more from this data. Take a fresh look. What are the three things you’d really like to change/improve in these numbers? What are you doing right now to make these happen?

- Talk to customers – every time I contact a customer and have a discussion, I always a) learn something useful; and b) wish I contacted more every day. Get some random e-mail addresses from your sales staff or your CRM system, and send them a note just introducing yourself as the product manager and saying that you were just curious how they were doing, and what they were thinking about the product? Then after they answer you, let them know how grateful you are for their candid feedback and send them something – a shirt, a card, a starbucks gift card, anything.

- Review your product strategy and roadmap – sometimes we get so immersed in day-to-day execution that we can easily lose sight of the big picture. Take a fresh look at your product strategy and roadmap. Don’t have one? You should. Write it. Where do you want your product to be in three years? How should you get from here to there?

- Review your calendar – time management is a big subject that I’ll need to cover in a future article, but those of you that spend your day rushing from one meeting to the next and at the end of the day/week/month realize that you’ve been working 60 plus hours a week and not really getting anywhere know that something has to change if you want to start making a real difference for your product. Start by reviewing your calendar and setting the goal of clearing at least 10 additional hours and blocking them off for time to work on the things that will make a real difference to your product over the long-term.

- Use your product – when is the last time you actually sat down and used your product? If it was more than 48 hours ago, that’s probably too long. Or even better, instead of you using your product, watch a prospective user try to use it. Set up an informal usability test of your product and watch or lead the test. I promise you’ll learn something useful.

- Learn a new technology – remember that great product management is all about combining what is desirable with what is just now possible. So much rests on your ability to envision new possibilities. There are always several new and relevant technologies just waiting for you to learn them and assimilate them into your thinking. Go hang out for a while with your main architect. What technologies is he or she looking into?

Why?

- Hang with the enemy – take a look at a new competitor and try to identify three things you like about their approach. In my experience you can learn something useful from every product. It’s too easy to assume all competitors are clueless. They may or may not be, but do yourself a favor and assume there are three really useful ideas buried in there and go find them.

- Do a little reflecting – consider a product decision you made in the past year that, in retrospect, wasn’t the best choice, and identify how you might have made a better decision. Was there some data you could have reviewed but didn’t? Did you skip talking to users about this under the assumption that because you liked it they would too? Realize you’ll still need to make decisions with less than full information, but see if you can’t refine the set of information that you find truly essential prior to making the call.

- Think – product management is a very cerebral job. But it’s remarkable to me how so many try to do the job without giving themselves the time they need to actually think through problems. Get yourself some quality, uninterrupted thinking time. Even better, block some time out each day for this on your calendar.

- Don’t Think – sometimes in order to solve really hard problems, we need to take our mind off work. Read a great novel, or go for a long run or ride. Don’t worry; your brain will still be thinking about your problem, you just won’t realize it until you wake up the next morning with a solution.

If all else fails, remember that you’ve got the best job on the product team. Unlike most positions, you’re able to directly impact the future of your product. So hang in there and outwit, outlast and outplay your competitors.

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Look at any successful company and you’ll find a set of people that stand out and are the ones that really make the difference. It may be the difference between a great product or a terrible one. Or the difference between getting the business partnership the company needs to reach its customers or getting lost in obscurity. Or the difference between getting the product out when it needs to be or stuck in perpetual delays.

eBay is by anyone’s definition a very successful company, and it has some extremely strong people in each of these areas and more. But the company recently suffered a blow with the retirement of the person that behind the scenes was probably more than anyone responsible for the astounding amount of quality software they’ve produced each and every week for the past 5 years, Lynn Reedy.

eBay has a very unusual product development process, but three key characteristics of this process are that it is extremely productive, extremely demanding, and it is a process predicated on an extremely strong project management competency. Over her time at eBay, Lynn rose to run the majority of the product development organization, and while she has many talents, at her core she is a project manager, and in fact the very best project management mind I’ve ever had the privilege of working with. Before I joined eBay I thought I was pretty good at project management, but she showed me where the bar really was.

In many companies (not including eBay, but including companies like Yahoo and Microsoft), the product manager is also responsible for some or all of project management. In my view, the jobs of product management and project management are different enough that in all but small teams I typically recommend separate people for the separate roles. But in every case I believe that developing strong project management skills is a big advantage for product managers – at the least your product will get to market faster, and it could make the difference between getting your product shipped at all.

I think most people equate project management with MS Project, coordinating status meetings, and documenting the product development processes. But these people miss the real point of project management. These are the seven skills that I think characterize great project managers like Lynn:

Sense of Urgency – Just by walking into the room Lynn would instantly convey a sense of urgency. Pre-meeting banter was maybe 60 seconds, and then it was down to business. Partly this was due to her unique diet of sugar and caffeine, but in fact a sense of urgency is at the heart of the eBay culture and was best personified by Lynn.

Framers – There are so many reasons for aimless, unconstructive meetings, but one of the biggest culprits is that it’s not always clear to the participants exactly what the purpose of the meeting is, what problem is to be solved, and what the specific issues or obstacles are. Great project managers understand how to clearly and concisely identify and frame problems.

Clear Thinking – The typical business issue typically includes multiple underlying causes with a healthy dose of politics, personal agendas and personalities thrown in. The project manager needs to isolate the separate issues, and untangle the emotion and baggage from the issue to expose the underlying problem and get everyone focused on the solution.

Data Driven – Great project managers understand the key role that data plays in informing them about precisely where they are and where they need to be. They are constantly looking to improve the process and the result, and they know this begins with measurement. It is all too easy to just shoot from the hip, especially in time-sensitive situations, so it’s essential for the project manager to insist on the data.

Decisiveness – In most organizational models, the members of the product team don’t actually report to the project manager, yet he or she must drive decisions. This is where the project manager must communicate the sense of urgency, clearly frame the problem, have rational and transparent reasoning, and make decisions based on the data. The project manager also needs to know when it is appropriate to collect the data and recommendation from the team, and escalate the issue to senior management.

Judgment – Much of the above hinges on good judgment – knowing when to push, when to escalate, when to get more information, and when to take someone aside and have a little private chat. This trait is harder to teach, but experience can help.

Attitude – Finally, there are always hundreds of very valid reasons why your product shouldn’t ship - not feasible, not enough resources, not enough time, not enough money, etc. The job of the project manager is to get over each and every one of these obstacles. At its core, great project managers are great problem solvers. The great project manager doesn’t make excuses, she makes it happen. She is tireless and unstoppable.

I truly believe that eBay would not be the success it is today without Lynn and the project management discipline she brought to the company and the culture. As she catches up on 5 years of little sleep, hopefully the company has developed leaders that can maintain the pace she has set. But all project mangers, product managers, and engineering managers can learn a lot from her example.

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