Being a product leader requires enormous efforts and being in tune with the market and customer needs. For that reason, product leaders are the ones who guide the company's strategy. What should product leaders do to stay successful in a fast-growing market?
Transparent and unique communication
A product leader has to collaborate with designers, developers, and other executives related to product development and make sure everyone is on the same page. To do this effectively every product leader needs to have strong communication skills and be able to provide concise and clear directions for others to follow.
All successful product leaders have either great communication skills or perfected their craft by taking proper steps and training in the right direction. Developing communication skills is not hard but it is very important for the overall success of any product development team.
Here is a list of factors that would help a product leader develop communication skills very effectively:
- Listening actively to the team and showing empathy
- Improving presentation and writing skills
- Incorporate technology to make communication effective
- Communication goals and vision clearly to the product development team
- Providing detailed feedback and conduction 1-1 meeting
It is important to have a system in place for effective communication with all the members of the team. This is where the user portal of Producter can come in very handy. The user portal is activated automatically when a workspace is created. The user portal can be used for regular communication to track progress and keep records.
Through communication, it is very important for product leaders to build strong working relationships with all the members of the team. Team management becomes very easy when the product leader is able to set clear goals, expectations, and deadlines related to various projects.
Strong customer relations
Building a strong relationship with the customers is what every brand should aim for if they want to have a loyal customer base in the future. One of the best ways to do that is by opening more channels for your customers to communicate with your brand. The role of a product leader is very crucial in developing strong customer relationships.
While developing product design, options should be created for customers to give their feedback and rating about the different features of a product. Pop-up surveys should also be designed to know how a customer is reacting to a new feature update. Communities should be build inside the product for the users to communicate with each other to get valuable user insights.
A very effective step is for the team leader to talk to the sales department and customer service agents who directly talk to the customers daily. By conducting a meeting with the sales and customer service team more clarity can be achieved about the core problems that the customers need a solution to. The idea of new innovative features can be the result of these meetings.
Customer relationships grow stronger when your customer knows that you are working relentlessly on solving their problems. It is only possible to inform the customers about your dedication to solving their problems when strong communication channels are in place.
Closing the feedback loop
Once feedback is collected from the customers it is important to assort them. The importance of feedback can be determined based on how many people want this to be addressed. Then the feedback needs to be analyzed and translated to new features that need to be included in the product.
The next step is to rank the importance of every new feature which can be based on how easy it is to develop the new feature, how many customers are demanding the feature, and how this feature will make the product more useful overall. In this step, product leaders play a very important role in determining which features need to be worked on first.
It is important to have a system in place to store all customer feedback, translated features, accepted features, and features on hold to keep valuable records. The features that need to be worked on also need to be assigned to developers, team leaders, designers, and other members.
Producter has a user portal where leaders can check the progress of the team very easily. A new feature is launched named changelog which can be used to inform the customers whenever a new feature is live that addressed their problem. The change log feature is a very effective feature to develop customer relationships and show them that your team cares about their feedback. Try Producter’s changelog feature to win your customers’ love by building strong relationships with them.
Fast and accurate product development
Speed is the name of the game. The modern world is fast and ever-changing and consumers are impatient. They need everything fast. To cater to such a fast-paced market, the products need to be both innovative and launched quickly so your customers can get their hands on them.
A product leader needs to have both vision and a sense of realism. Great product leaders find a safe route to take even in a risky market. The development strategy, positioning pricing, and marketing of the product should be very clear in the mind of a product leader.
For faster product development, a product leader also needs to have UI UX understanding and knowledge about the programming language and technologies that should be used in the development of the product. Product leaders don’t need to have coding knowledge but a tech-savvy leader would be able to layout out developments plan more smoothly and set realistic deadlines for the developers.
Building SOPs, frameworks, and having processes in place are good practices and they mostly work. But, what really is needed is to make the frameworks more agile so they can be adapted easily when there is a requirement for a change to develop a new product.
For accuracy, a product leader should rely on data. Testing the data to prove assumptions right or wrong is what any sound product leader must do. Data interpretation is a very important skill that a product leader must have, but often they don’t say the full story. A good product leader knows when to follow intuition and communicate the risk associated with other executives of the company.
Producter is a product management tool designed to become customer-driven.
It helps you collect feedback, manage tasks, sharing product updates, creating product docs, and tracking roadmap.
