Data is an essential element in today’s Product Management and Product Marketing. Data handling involves understanding it, manipulating it, processing it, safeguarding it, or even trading it in businesses.
Data is a crucial factor in making decisions about your product’s strategy, design, marketing as-well-as modifying your products as per the data received in the form of user reviews.
Data is a crucial factor for product managers while working in various fields. Every product manager must be familiar with data handling techniques; otherwise, it can be baffling to decide where to commence.
Significance of Data
With new technological breakthroughs and the increasing accessibility of the internet to people, product managers are often bombarded with vast chunks of data from various sources.
Here are some of the reasons why data has become so significant in the era of modernization –
1. Data is The New Oil
Data is considered a valuable business resource in the era of rapidly progressing technology. Every brand or business utilizes data to realize the performance of their products or services in the market.
Data helps product managers make rational decisions about upcoming products and necessary alterations that need to be made to yield fruitful sales.
Data helps gather insightful data about previous sales and ways to improve them drastically, which otherwise wouldn’t have been viable.
2. Learning to Use Excel
Product managers mostly receive data in some raw format that needs cleaning, sorting, and processing. Due to this, managers then learn MS excel, which in turn adds value to the business.
Product managers use excel in building dashboards that help store data and provide a broader picture while working.
The data received requires some calculations and modifications that can otherwise be challenging if Excel is not employed.
Product managers who don’t utilize excel have to write macros using the built-in programming language, which is as tedious as it sounds.
While product managers handle the data, they get to learn Excel, so make use of its mathematical tools.
Josh Fetcher is a company that helps various other companies scale as-well-as offer product management and other courses intelligently.
Visiting this platform can help you understand the product management career path better and gain deeper insights into becoming a successful product manager.
3. Understanding Your Customers Better
Being a good Product Manager is also about knowing what customers want and what all problems, habits, or preferences they possess. This meaningful information is called data.
You need to put together your customers’ profiles, and to do that, you require data knowledge.
Your customers’ behavior is crucial for your decision-making, as customer profiles help make sound decisions considering user experiences and likings.
Not only are you required to understand your customers before building your product, but it is also paramount that you realize how they respond to it post-launch.
Receiving vital information about pain points and where there is a plummet in user satisfaction, all come under the category of data handling.
If you understand data, it would be easy to extrapolate the areas that need improvements.
Not only designing your future products, but data analytics also help you when it comes to procuring feedback from customers.
Feedback tells what customers think about your products or services and what more do they wish to be included.
Product data provides a diverse scale of answers to who exactly are your customers, their purpose of utilization of your product, and what they think about it.
4. Executing Better Product Decisions
Learning data helps product managers execute better product decisions.
It is the job of the product manager to find out whether the product has been successful and how alterations in the lineup have affected sales.
To procure such intellect, you need to congregate feedback and data. Provided that you know how to interpret the data, it can allow you to refine your product.
As you try refining your product, a stream of data would be there to help you make decisions that would rely on facts, and not mere assumptions or instincts.
This is very critical to build brand new products, or for Product Managers who have entered in a new industry. Having your decisions based on hard facts would help you climb success briskly.
5. Better Communication With Data Scientists
Teams in any firm operate cross-functionally, so knowing your data and discussing it with your data scientists would put you at a great advantage.
With a better understanding of data, it would be easier to communicate with the data scientists, thereby eliminating any errors that would earlier arise due to lack of communication.
There are many data-centric roles within the hierarchies of big businesses, and to climb up the ranks, it is essential that you become competent enough to work with the data scientists.
The knowledge of data would also help in better collaborations with other firms in the future and would help strengthen relationships.
Josh Fetcher can help you type a product manager cover letter quickly to land a decent impression on various personnel higher in the hierarchy.
6. Enhanced Time Optimization
Knowing data can help in optimizing your time efficiently by differentiating urgent things from other things. This process often demands inevitable trade-offs.
While working on a particular aspect, it is not uncommon for people to neglect the other one, which might leave a negative impact.
However, data gives you a pretty good idea as to what that weak point might be and the kind of effect it would leave.
Data helps you equally differentiate between certain key aspects but also ensures that you don’t leave anything behind while being too engrossed in a particular task.
7. Managing Stakeholders and Product Teams
Without hard facts that are procured from data, your opinion would not have much weight attached to it.
When it comes to influencing fellow team members, and aligning them on a unified product vision, data is the way to go.
Data also helps when dealing with stakeholders. Showing facts and analytics derived from data would help you corroborate your statements and assertions.
Final Words
Data is an emerging trend in the line of product manager, and with its significant hold over the market, you need to have a firm grip on data handling and visualization.
Data can help establish better communication within the team and with the data scientists of your firm.
Provided that you have some knowledge of data, the company would be immensely benefitted with this new skill of yours.
Apart from doing your job, you would also be able to cater to data and help your company in multiple ways.