Author: Alex Schlosberg

Captain on the field

With any team, especially football (American), you train, practice, prepare both physically and mentally, all so you can execute at the highest level every week during the game. But, no matter how much game film you watch, or how often you run through the playbook during pregame, there still needs to be someone on the field calling the plays and making the tough decisions when the game is on the line. For football teams, this is unequivocally the Quarterback. Calling an audible (this is when they change the play last minute) when the initial play is not the optimal one. Trusting their teammates to do their jobs. All in the spirit of competing and winning at the pinnacle of their sport. There is a reason that almost every quarterback in the NFL wears that C for “Captain” on their chest.

Product managers serve the same role in any successful product and engineering team. The Captain in the conference room (or Zoom room), they have to be more prepared with data and customer understanding than anyone else. They are the ones the rest of the team relies on to drive everything in the direction that will correlate to the most success. If the executive team are the coaches, helping to mentor and prepare the team and drive the overall company direction, the product managers are the Quarterbacks, ready to call an audible at the line and make the toughest decisions: what will bring the most value to their customers?

Leading the team

Not only are PMs the ones who have to be armed with the most information, but they also have to dictate in which areas the development team focuses. Think of your backend devs as the offensive line, laying the foundation and setting the tone for how the offense/codebase is built at scale. Then come your fullstack and frontend devs, your skill players who score big points and give your app the look and feel that brings customers in the door and keeps them there. They are all extremely skilled at their jobs, and contribute to the success of the team, but at the end of the day, it is the PM who calls the plays and runs the offense through the engineering leaders and their teams.

With product usage metrics, call recordings and transcriptions, competitive analysis, and customer conversations, product teams have more data at their fingertips than ever before. With the ever-growing access to differing forms of game film, the analysis to best prepare what will bring value to customers becomes more and more difficult. 

Productize brings data science to the forefront, showing the most valuable plays to run at any given time. By automating the pregame preparation and analysis that helps lead to the highest chance of success, it allows the Product Managers to focus on leading, on being the Captain, and guiding the team down the field when the game is on the line. Isn’t it about time we put a C on their chests too? 

The Data Problem

As data has become the foundation of how our world is shaped, particularly when it comes to business, data science has become the key to unlocking the meaning behind it all. From cloud computing to speech transcription, to dynamic pricing, all the keys to success now stem from data science, AI, and ML. So the question remains, why should Product Management be left out in the cold?

When prioritizing a roadmap, product management teams may have the most difficult job in business. They have to compile, understand, and optimize for what will create the most value for customers and prospects, all while balancing the time and effort it will take to develop these features and functionality. While there are different methodologies for this that many teams use today (RICE, OKR, etc.), the problem remains that there is simply too much data for any amount of people to adequately analyze on their own.

Data as Intelligence

In today’s Product-Led-Growth vs. Enterprise-Sales-Motion world, there are many solutions that unlock data for PMs & POs. From NPS and customer reviews to competitive analysis, to product usage metrics, to feedback and feature requests from Sales and Support, these point solutions give access to everything that is fundamental to doing their jobs. The problem still remains that all of these still have to be digested and analyzed manually, one at a time. What do you do if your CEO is telling you what they think needs to be in the product, but the data suggests that the majority of your users will not benefit? 

Productize is solving this by bringing Intelligence to the product management world. Unlocking the science behind all of this data is the key to making sure that teams are always shipping what is most valuable to their customers. With data science at its core, you can validate if what your sales team is asking for matches with what your usage data is also indicating. You can immediately understand how your ICP feels about your competitors vs. your own platform. You can have a backup for when you have to say “no” to your Sales team or CEO. No longer does product analysis have to be left in the data abyss. Product Intelligence changes how we can think about prioritization, and what it truly means to create value for customers.