← Product management

What We Do

Our Charter

We approach product management with an open mind, desiring to advocate for the end user, the customer, the company, and the team. We make decisions with empathy for both the end user and the customer, who each utilize our products on a daily basis. Our primary goal is to be the voice of these stakeholders in making decisions about what we build and why. This provides us the ability to solve the right problems at the right time.

We strive to achieve our goals centered around our beliefs. We believe in fostering a supportive, honest environment centered around trust. We believe work-life balance matters, understanding that our work cadence will be cyclical. We believe in collaboration, self-awareness, critical thinking, healthy conflict, and humility. We believe diversity is a key part of our success, and everyone on the team plays a critical role.

We understand personal and product growth is a long cycle. We are responsible for taking action at both large and small scales. In all of this, we aim to do the right thing, do whatever it takes, and have fun.

Collaboration

Everything we do is collaborative with one another and other teams. We all succeed and fail together as a team. In all settings, we communicate well for an open exchange of ideas. Communication is as much about active listening as it is about clearly sharing your thoughts. Our collaboration must be flexible and fit within our remote context, and it will frequently happen asynchronously.

Accountability

We believe it’s important to be accountable to ourselves, to each other, to the end users of our products, and to JHA so that our shared goals can be accomplished. We communicate our intent and act with an understanding of the desired outcomes and risk. We understand that successful collaboration requires personal accountability. When each of us remains focused on achieving long-term results, learning from any mistakes, and growing together, we can ensure the Digital Product team as a whole is effective. To facilitate growth, we provide constructive feedback and listen well when feedback is provided.

Core Skills

A variety of core skills make up a product manager. No individual is an expert in all of them. Together as a team, we balance each other. Depending on an individual’s role, they will have more competency in a wider variety of these skills:

  • Has empathy for the customer and the end user and is passionate about solving problems.
  • Communicates effectively with team members, senior management, and customers.
  • Collaborates with diverse, cross-functional teams.
  • Manages time well to focus on the right thing at the right time.
  • Prioritizes the right problems and clearly defends the prioritization.
  • Understands value propositions for customers and end users.
  • Understands how end users with varying levels of experience utilize our products.
  • Analyzes complex, independent factors to make decisions.
  • Designs and conducts research to understand customer and market needs.
  • Collects end user and customer feedback for continuous improvement.
  • Develops KPIs and measurements for success of projects.
  • Focuses on impact across the organization and product line.
  • Understands and balances the relationship between the impact of a feature/project and the effort/cost to achieve the goal.

Technical Product Manager Core Skills

Some product managers have a more technical focus and have a unique skill set in addition to the skills all product managers possess. These allow for greater coordination and interaction with engineering teams and analysts.

  • Connects technical concepts to end user experience.
  • Comprehends and interprets technical documentation for others, including API docs.
  • Understands code sufficiently to have technical input into API and architecture discussions.
  • Runs meetings with technical team members.

Work Balance

All product managers spend their time primarily defining, prioritizing, and solving problems. This breakdown of time spent over the course of a week isn’t prescriptive, but merely a guideline to describe the relative balance between various core roles of a product manager.

Prioritize & Define the Problem (30%)
A solution is only as good as a product manager’s understanding of the problem. This stage of the project isn’t sexy, but it’s the right thing to do. This work is also mostly invisible. It’s represented in product briefs, research notes, prioritized backlogs, and ultimately the roadmap.

Discover & Solve (20%)
Putting together the right approach to solving a problem is a collaborative effort between product, analysts, design, and engineering. Product managers spend this portion of their time with cross-functional teams to explain the problem we’re solving, share our end users’ stories to build empathy, scope, define, and revise what will ultimately be built. This includes revising briefs, developing requirements documents, and ensuring we’re doing the right thing to address the prioritized problem.

Build (25%)
Software doesn’t build itself, and product is involved in the engineering process. Product managers are available to facilitate meetings, document decisions, and continue making decisions about the execution and scope of a solution. There is a measure of project management to this stage of the process, but we are not heavy-handed project or engineering managers. Banno product managers are not solely responsible for the engineering timelines, but they coordinate with engineering managers and project management with an emphasis on rapid delivery.

Go to Market (15%)
Product managers are an integral part of preparing a feature for delivery, quality assurance, and implementation. We coordinate with the larger cross-functional teams for features to ensure a feature is well tested and that our operational staff has the documentation and resources needed to support customers. Finally, product managers lead customer communication efforts by describing how we’re solving problems for our users.

Follow-up & Support (10%)
Once features ship, product managers are available to assist operations and sales teams to answer questions and guide ongoing documentation needs. After a feature has been tested in the market, product managers check in with stakeholders which may include customers and our operations teams to ensure the problem has been solved.