The product management paradox — striking the right balance.

It feels like as a product manager, you can find yourself getting tied up in knots trying to find the right answer, and just when you do, the right answer changes. On top of that, every product and the environment it operates in is different. So it’s really easy to get stuck. Here’s how I’ve convinced myself that it’s ok to be uncomfortable, and embracing uncertainty and flexibility is the key.

Welcome to the ‘new normal’

I joined Parkinson’s UK and the Parkinson’s Connect service design team during a global pandemic, remotely and after a few months of not working. Like all of us in one way or another this year, it was a new and slightly challenging experience.

As a product manager, I like to have a clear goal and understanding of the service users we’re building for. Finding that role in a well established team of experts, who were adapting in real time to respond to the climate, left me fretting a bit about the best way to support the work. After reflecting a few weeks in, I had to sit back and try and determine what the actual problem was and what I could do to add value. What I landed on was this…

Acting as the counterbalance

Product management is about trade-offs. There’s hardly ever one right answer and no one product manager is the same. In fact the same product manager needs to be different in different circumstances and different conversations. In short, a product manager often brings the balance to whoever or whatever challenge they’re faced with at the time.

Here are a few common product management dilemmas:

• A high priority activity for the organisation needs to build some new elements to deliver the core message and call to action. It’s a high development cost but likely to increase conversion by an undefined amount. What do you do?
• The product team has defined a new journey that maximises the efficiency of the product but creates more of an overhead for internal processes. Do you build?
• Users tell you through feedback that they want an easier way to complete a process, but the insight actually suggests they aren’t understanding the process. How do you decide what needs changing?

In all of these examples, there’s not really a categorically right or wrong way — they’re trade offs. And because it’s often really tricky to get an equal amount of attention from everyone who makes a decision, managing these trade-offs is almost impossible. Besides, if you asked other product managers how they’d approach this, they’d have slightly different perspectives, based on previous experiences and organisational knowledge. You’d probably find yourself with more questions than answers! So how does this help?

Embracing the paradox

We live in a world of paradoxes. We can strongly support action on climate change but it’s not always possible to make sustainable purchases. We wish for the sun and then immediately resent it when we’re too hot.

The environment we’re surrounded by creates these paradoxes, and that’s no different for product managers. As much as we want to drive toward clarity, it’s not very easy to achieve. For me it’s reassuring to acknowledge that I need to be different people at different times and that there are no consistent answers. Accepting and embracing this is what helps me add the most value for my products and services — in the current context for those affected by Parkinson’s.

Enter the product management paradox. As with the environment I’ve just described, each trade-off will look different, I’ve found it a useful exercise to consider the environment and different perspectives of stakeholders.

Tips on managing the paradox

• Decide and call out what perspective you’re taking on the decision or task, and recognise what the opposite view is
• Reflect on your interactions, understand the people you work with, the context they’re working in and understand the benefit they’re driving for
• Share a situation where you’re stuck on the fence with someone who is impartial to the decision
• Tell yourself it’s ok to not know and work it out as you go and be open to changing your mind

What does it all mean?

Parkinson’s Connect as a programme has hugely ambitious targets that can be reached in so many different ways, and what’s made my experience to date and the work that’s been done so valuable is allowing that adaptability and changes in perspectives to happen alongside so many experts across the organisation.

As product managers, we want to drive value for the organisation and for users of our products, by setting measures of success, but success as a product manager isn’t always about achieving metrics. It’s also about learning, adapting and responding to situations that are always changing. And sometimes that’s not comfortable, but it is necessary.

I’ve found this a really useful personal reflection — I hope you have too!

Joe, Product Manager