Three Key Product Management Lessons from the Founder and CEO of productLivity

Whether you’re new to the product management field or a seasoned professional, it’s always valuable to learn from your peers’ lived experiences. From learning more about their career path to predicted trends to general tips and advice, there’s no shortage of lessons to be learned that can ultimately help you develop and become a better product expert yourself.

We recently sat down with four product experts and asked them about their experiences in this field. While you can watch the full hour-long interview here, this post breaks down four of the key lessons we learned from Lauren Chan Lee, the founder and CEO of productLivity.

We asked Lauren to weigh in on four key questions:

1. What are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?
2. What are some trends you anticipate happening in the next several years?
3. What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?
4. What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

About Lauren: Lauren is a product leader, speaker, and advisor, and was most recently the Senior Director of Product Management at Care.com. She now is the founder and CEO of productLivity. Over her career, she’s worked on almost every product area—from front end to backend, desktop to mobile apps, buyer to seller, and discovery to payments.

→WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW HERE

What do you think are some of the most common challenges faced in product management?

“The challenge is working through people. Whether it is motivating your development team or getting your stakeholders to buy into your prioritization, it all boils down to: Can you work through people? Sometimes I joke that we produce nothing except that we help all the pieces fit together and to run smoothly.”

What strategies do you use to prioritize your product roadmap? What tools or methodologies do you use?

“I think it’s so important to spend the time upfront to really define what your prioritization framework is and get buy-in with your stakeholders on the criteria that you’re using to prioritize. You need to make sure that everyone is bought into that framework that you’re using before you go off and execute it because otherwise, they’re not going to go along with the results of the prioritization.”

What have been your favorite ways to connect and get feedback from your customers?

“I really love that kind of pairing between Quant and Qual. Qualitative doesn’t necessarily scale. You can’t go and do user interviews with every single customer. But what you can do is get a pulse by doing a sample of qualitative. And then based on that, you’ll hear about all the different value props that exist and what is important to that set of customers. Then you go and do quantitative to test that out on a bigger population and validate whether the things that you heard that you got a lot of color on from the user interviews that you did, whether that holds out with the rest of your customer base.”

Download the eBook to read the interviews here or watch the full webinar here.