Women fans x Google's series of courses, classes! Kevin Fu, Google Pixel Camera Product Manager, shares with participants how to be a good product manager and what impact can you make as a product manager?
The first online course for 2021 CFG begins with CFG lesson "How to Be a Good Product Manager" by Women Fans x Google, and google Meet, where 100 people take classes together online! Google has two great product managers, Kevin Fu, Google Pixel Camera Product Manager, and Sharleene Yuan, Google Android Accessibility Product Manager, to share their solid experience as product managers.
Course participants, including software engineers, magazine editors, marketing, students, etc., from different backgrounds, use tools to do online interaction, agreed text symbols instead of clapping hands, forming a tacit understanding of smooth interaction between speakers and readers. The focus of the course is captured by the Women's Fan Content Team and shared with all readers interested in the technology industry and product managers.
What exactly is the product manager doing?
Kevin, Google Pixel's camera product manager, first introduced himself, who has been a product manager at Google for three years and has worked in marketing-related work, but as his career and self-awareness have grown, he has found himself wanting to create products that will help people, and now working with Google teams in Taiwan and the United States, he's happy to say that it's great to create products that make people's lives better, and he's willing to share experiences of the process.
He then briskingly cuts into the focus of the course, splitting out three of the course's top questions:
- What exactly is the Product Manager (PM) doing at Google?
- How to be a good product manager?
- After listening to the following, do you still want to be a product manager?
What is the PM doing? Kevin mentions that the first responsibility of the product manager is to ensure that the product meets the user's needs, problems, and that the product can be online and rolled out.
He also mentions the difference between a product manager and a project manager, whose main job is to answer "what exactly to do" and "why do it?", and the "why do you want to do it", and the fact that he already knows what to do, which is how to ensure that the product is time-framed and achieves its goals to create the product.
Product managers must establish a product vision, product five-year, ten-year planning is what, to find out user pain points, customer needs, and customer communication. Turn big issues into breakdowns that can be performed, know the product schedule, find and arrange resources, focus on weekly progress completion, and communicate with the product team and management.
What is the common myth of being a product manager?
Kevin mentions the common myth of the general public: "Can the PM make all the decisions on his own?" , the answer is yes, the decision is made by the consensus of an entire team.
Product managers don't need to make all the decisions, but they need to unify everyone's consensus, make sure a decision is made, and keep asking the most important question: "Why are we going to do this?"
When the problem to be solved is analyzed, then the problem begins to be solved. "When it comes to solving, everyone on the team throws out their professional ideas and has a lot of discussion, but it's the product manager's responsibility to respect his or her area and converge on a wide range of opinions and make a decision - so to speak: whether a product succeeds or not is the responsibility of the product manager."
The purpose of the team is to create great products, what the job title is not important, what you do is the most important thing.
How to be a good product manager?
Kevin' three years of experience as a product manager at Google lists several competencies he believes he needs to be a good product manager:
1. Become an expert and voice channel in this field
For you to research and develop the product with a high degree of curiosity, pay close attention to or even personally communicate with users to understand the deep problems of users.
In a meeting, different departments will go through their expertise to discuss that the product needs some kind of functionality to successfully go online, but in the meeting you need to speak on behalf of an "invisible user", that is, you want to help the user communicate with the team: "What exactly do users want?"
2. Find the right problem and solve it
Kevin emphasizes that there are many ways to solve problems, and that you can make changes while working with your team, so being a product manager requires parsing user pain points and finding "right issues." Here's a tip to share with everyone, who can ask yourself, "As a user, I want to solve something, but there's no way, why?"
Then you can rationally prioritize things, because a good product, not every feature online is a good thing, so you have the ability to analyze data to help you make the priority of your choices, and making decisions is often difficult.
3. Build a corporate culture
Because the company's resources are limited, you have to make a good trade-off between the value of the product and the burden of the company. And respect everyone's opinion, make sure that everyone's voice in the team can be heard, can accept feedback, shape the culture of the enterprise.
4. Communication, communication, and then communication
Product managers need to be able to translate ambiguous concepts into clear and understandable specifics. In other words, to be able to tear down difficult things into executable steps, you even have the ability to speak out in 30 seconds so that people from all backgrounds can understand them. And where the team needs to be, it needs to be able to be that kind of person, with diversity and flexibility.
The product manager's influence, not just on the product, is to create a culture in which the diverse voices of the team can be heard and open to feedback.
Do you want to be a product manager from today?
Kevin clearly analyzes the capabilities that are needed to be a good product manager, and the abilities that can be learned while doing so. The most important thing is - do you have a lot of curiosity? For their own company's products, would you like to contact data, personal contact with users to in-depth understanding? Can you ask a lot, many why, be the most curious and asked questions on the team?
As a good product manager, you have to find the right users and the right problems and solve those problems until there are no problems.
If you are, or are interested in, you may be able to start learning the skills of a product manager, or you may try to gain opportunities and experience, and you can grow more confidently and continuously on your way to a product manager.
Kevin's incisive sharing ends here, with the next course being attended by Sharlene, the Google Android Accessibility Product Manager. What does Sharlene have to offer us, compared to Kevin's observations, about the idea of a "product manager" (PM) and what wonderful feedback does a woman's status give us on the balance between her career and her life?