Last week I wrote that good product managers prioritise more than features—for example, considering security and performance requirements. This isn’t everyone’s experience, unfortunately, but such people do exist.

Once I worked with a very effective security expert, and it was thanks to them that our product manager choose to spend some time enhancing the security of the product.

Similarly, a product team isn’t just about writing software. I once worked at an organisation where one team was improving the data analysis tools for the other teams. I expected them to be writing software, and of course that is part of what they did. But I was very impressed when the product manager said success was about those other teams making better analyses of their data, and therefore part of the team’s responsibility was education. They needed to make sure that the tools were understood and used successfully by those other teams, so—in addition to writing software—they would spend some time helping those teams learn them.

We all need to remember that the work we do in our teams is part of a greater success, and to achieve that we often need to do more than just deliver features.

Photo by Nomad Tales