Product management is one of the most sought-after professions in tech. Why? A product manager is often viewed as the individual responsible for driving a product to utter success or complete failure. So how do product managers do it?

While the industry has varying views of what a product manager does, at PayPal, what makes one truly successful is a combination of customer empathy, leading without authority, and a data-driven approach to solving real-world problems. I’ve summarized three practices that will help you master being a successful product manager.

You may have heardthat the product manager is considered the CEO of the product. Not true. A product manager truly has all the responsibility, but none of the authority of a CEO. In other words, a product manager needs to lead without authority.

So how does a product manager then lead a product to success?

Start with Discovery

Before you determine what to build, determine who to build it for.

Who is your customer? What are their biggest problems? At PayPal, the journey of product building begins with customer discovery.

Customer discovery is quintessential for developing empathy for our customers — one of the key ingredients to being a successful product manager. Product teams that span different organizations come together to learn about our target customer segments through interviews and surveys. After weeks of discovery and hours of interviews, the discovery team identifies all the problem statements. Then we narrow them down to the most common and important problems the customer is facing. Finally, product managers define the top-level requirements to arrive at the distilled product description.

It is common to make assumptions about the customer, especially as the product manager of an internal team delivering products for customers within your company. As a product manager for PayPal’s AI & machine learning platform, we started our product journey with several assumptions and even had a product proposal in mind. However, we followed all the principles of discovery and conducted over 50 interviews with our stakeholders in consumer, merchant, corporate strategy, and customer services. At the end of discovery, our product ended up looking different from the initial proposal, and our customers were glad to see their pain points being directly addressed in the product.

Create a Safe Environment for Your Team

Being a product manager is like having all the responsibility of a CEO, but none of the authority. A successful product manager is one who is able to lead a cross-functional team of people, without direct managerial authority.

The people, process, and product journey starts with people. As a PM, you have a goal to deliver a product and satisfy key success criterion. To do so, you are required to come up with a coherent plan, which will evolve along the journey. A big part of your plan will include the people you choose to recruit.

Think about an analogy of climbing a mountain. In the beginning, when you build, you plan for the journey. You rarely know about the obstacles you will encounter along the way. Similarly, a product manager knows very little about the problems they will encounter. A key engineer may fall ill, deliverables from dependent teams may get delayed, your team size may shrink, etc. To help you navigate these obstacles and recalibrate your plan, you need to ensure you have an amazing group of experts to help you assess the situation and adapt the plan until you achieve your goal.

As a product manager and as a leader, one of the most important things you can do is to empoweryour teammates.

This ensures you are not making decisions alone. Create a safe environment in which everyone has a voice, and where diverse opinions are respected. You make decisions collectively, so you progress collectively, and everyone feels more committed every step you take forward.

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Throughout the journey of building a product, from concept, to launch, and beyond, there will be decisions that need to be made. During the design and build phase, a product manager has to make decisions on which feature to prioritize, which metrics should they monitor, and what type of instrumentation they need to build into the product to better understand the performance. During launch, product managers need to determine what experiments should run i.e. during A/B testing, what segments they should target, which country to launch in, etc. Post launch, which is the most critical time to learn how your product is performing, they need to study the data, and monitor all KPIs to understand which features resonate with their customers. This will give them cues to investigate and improve the performance of the product going forward.

Building new products for emerging markets is especially hard, since you are operating in an evolving, untested market where you are not sure who your segment or customers are yet. You are at the forefront of innovation, so you don’t have data about adoption and competitor success. And yet as a product manager, your entire team is looking at you to determine the market segment, forecast revenue and sales, determine a path for profitability as well as handle operational details. Sound impossible? Not really! This is where you rely on early adopters to help shape your product until it is ready for the total addressable market.

In Conclusion

Many product managers focus on execution and do not realize the importance of these fundamental practices. However, in addition to sound execution, being successful as a product manager means evolving into a true customer champion, creating safety for your team, and making data-driven decisions. These practices will help both new and seasoned product managers develop a customer-centric mindset and enable them to be true customer champions.