“At the heart of every product person, there’s a desire to make someone’s life easier or simpler. If we listen to the customer and give them what they need, they’ll reciprocate with love and loyalty to your brand.”

Francis Brown, Product Development Manager, Alaska Airlines 

Creating a new product is hard. You’re producing something out of nothing, crafting it in a way that’s valuable enough for people to pay for… and normally doing so in a way that hasn’t been done before. 

When you’re building something that’s really new, there isn’t a playbook.

Even if you’re developing a product that’s already present in the market or in a well-established category, you still need to think of ways to make it better for consumers and design everything around their needs. 

Not only is it a challenge being the first to innovate a product, it also takes a considerable amount of time. You are typically dealing with uncertainty for months—or even years as you develop towards your end goal. 

As a product manager my entire career, I’ve worked on a number of different types of products across industries (and geographies) and I’ve seen some really difficult challenges. One thing that I’ve learned is that breaking the norm and finding ways to innovate, means that you need to be comfortable outside your comfort zones. You need to embrace being uncomfortable in the process of creating a product. 

In Crossfit, there’s a mantra of “embrace the suck,” which essentially means to be comfortable doing the difficult things, which is where the positive change comes from.

It is also typically the most messy and challenging that is ultimately the most valuable and rewarding.  

The biggest challenges in product leadership

Leading a product management team isn’t the easiest task because you need to juggle the responsibilities of being a part of the decision-making team and leading other product managers on the process of creating, all while making sure that you deliver an excellent product.  Here are some of the biggest challenges in product leadership:

Establishing a consistent process

Product development is at the heart of every business and at some point, it has to work with every department within the organization to ensure a smooth and seamless culture. 

In my experience, the process of building a product involves a lot of admin work, collaboration, communication and coordination that are all needed to move everything in the right decision. 

While it’s easier to establish processes within your team, it becomes difficult when you’re talking about the entire company.

Nevertheless, you have to create a consistent process to make sure that everyone is on the right page and errors could be avoided.

Procrastination

Procrastination is one of the biggest challenges of product leadership. When you procrastinate, you pull the rest of the process with you causing delays, errors and even bad relationships within your team. 

For instance, if you delay re-prioritizing a roadmap, everything else within your process is put on a halt. Product creation relies on a lot of top management decisions. These decisions must be well formulated, based on solid research, customer feedback and market validation. To solidify position on each of these can require a tremendous amount of work.

This is why a strong propensity to action is a paramount character trait to any successful product manager. You can’t wait around and let the world come to you. You have to go out and create it.

In fact, a survey reported that 25% of 2,500 product managers from some of the biggest companies in the world said that their biggest challenge is to set roadmap priorities without customer feedback.

If you procrastinate on creating a product roadmap, your engineers wouldn’t know what to do, you will have a hard time communicating with your team that could result to a substandard product and it could also affect the overall culture of your company.

Competition

All companies want to be seen and heard, and they are willing to make a lot of noise to achieve that. When you’re in the middle of it all, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and can result in difficulties with developing your own product. 

As a product manager, you can’t shy away from the challenge of benchmarking your competitors and taking a deep assessment of how your own capabilities match up to theirs.

By understanding what your customers need and what your competitors offer you will be able to make the right decisions about what product features to develop.

Failure to take this inventory and be honest with your assessment of different capabilities could send you down wrong paths about what to develop.  

Dependencies

Another huge challenge that product managers face is a clash between the engineering team and the leadership team. Each group depends on the other but has competing priorities. The executive team prioritizes bringing forward an exciting message that gets customers and investors excited. The engineering team prioritizes working on features that can be created and released in a timely fashion.

To address this problem (and the litany of others that present themselves throughout the development cycle) it’s very important for product leaders to bring together the different stakeholders across the organization and voice their concerns so an effective solutions can be created.

At the end of the day, there’s no room for avoiding challenges when you’re a product manager because if you do, these challenges will definitely bite you back at some point.