Are you an effective Product Evangelist?
Being a Product Evangelist is about “selling the dream”. It’s about inspiring people to see and create the future.
If you are a Product Manager, and you are not very good at evangelism there is a strong chance that your product efforts will get derailed before they even see the light of day. And if it does ship it will likely go the same way thousands of other large company efforts and wither on the vine.
It’s important that you build a team of missionaries and not mercenaries. And evangelism is a key tool to making this happen. The responsibility of creating such a team falls on the Product Manager.
There are many ways to communicate and visualize the value of what you (the Product Manager) are proposing to the team, stakeholders and investors.
Here are some of the top picks for Product Managers to sell the dream:
Share the pain: Show the team the customer’s pain you are trying to address. Bringing in the engineers for customer visits and meetings. When they see and experience for themselves, they understand the pain themselves.
Share the vision: Make sure you have, and share the product vision and product strategy very clearly. Show how the work will contribute to this vision.
Use a prototype: For many people, it’s hard to see the big picture when it’s a bunch of user stories. It’s difficult to see how things hang together (or even if it does at all). A prototype will be a better visualization.
Do your homework: Be the undisputed expert on your users, customers, competitors, market, and trends. Your team and stakeholders will follow you if they believe you know what you’re talking about.
Share learnings: After every customer visit or user test, share your learnings with the teams. Not just things that went well, but the problems too. Give your team the information they need to come up with a solution.
Share credit generously: Make the team view it as their product. However, when things don’t go well, step forward and take responsibility for the miss. Show your team you are learning from mistakes as well.
Learn how to give a great demo: We are not trying to teach them how to use it, but show them the value of what we are building. A demo is not a training or a test. It’s a persuasive tool. Get really good at it!
Be genuinely excited: If you’re not excited about what you are trying to sell, then, who will? Be genuinely enthusiastic about the product. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Spend time with your team: Spending time with every person in your team is crucial and pays off at the level of motivation and velocity at the end. If you are not co-located, put in special effort to travel every couple of months.