Major Product Management Challenges and How to overcome them

niraj ghosh
Aug 28, 2022
2 min read

✅ I have too many responsibilities

→ Rearrange your to-do lists to reflect the priority of your responsibilities

→ Consistently questioning the priority of the work you need to complete

→ Speak up to your manager and see if you need need to add another team member to share your workload

✅ I don’t have enough time in my day

→ Determine which productivity technique works for you by rearranging your schedule to give yourself more time.

→ Set some meeting-free time for yourself

→ Determine whether some days of the week are better suited for working remotely

✅ My team is too small

→ Set stretch goals

→ Consult with your teammates directly to identify your biggest resource limitations

→ Recruit new team members if necessary

✅ I want a better work/life balance

→ Take some time off to look after yourself

→ Give some serious thought to how you can better balance your personal and professional lives

✅ I don’t have budget

→ Build a stronger business case for expanding your scope, team, budget, and product positioning within the organisation by supporting your product by demonstrating ROI in advance

✅ Our competitors are moving faster/earlier than us

→ Take a step back and reevaluate your goals and mission

→ Be open to change and willing to reorder priorities based on what it will take to succeed in the market

→ Rearrange your priorities to more effectively deliver a product that customers will love

✅ We only get a small volume of customer feedback

→ Speak with a wider group of your clientele

→ Request customer feedback from within your product

→ Reward customers for their time spent providing feedback

✅ We have too many ideas, and prioritizing our product roadmap is hard

→ If your roadmap isn't aligned with customer needs, it's time to start over.

→ Support your hypotheses with data from the people who matter most—your customers

→ Once you have a data-backed plan in place, gather stakeholders and spend some time going through all of your current and upcoming project ideas

→ Prioritizing tasks based on a realistic amount of time can be made easier once everyone in the room is aware of how many projects or ideas there are

✅ We don’t test with consumers enough

→ Customers are the best focus group you can learn from

→ Proactively reach out to customers with in-app messages to encourage engagement

→ Consider using in-app surveys to gather feedback on a new feature

→ Provide open-ended text fields to learn more about an in-app engagement experience