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It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.
what I've just described is very much a waterfall process.
This model leads to sales‐driven specials and stakeholder‐driven products.
In this model, they're just there to implement—they're mercenaries.
In this model, it's more about gathering requirements and documenting them for engineers.
getting answers to four critical questions: Will the user buy this (or choose to use it)? Can the user figure out how to use this? Can our engineers build this? Can our stakeholders support this?
Usually, everyone on a product team is an individual contributor, and there are no people managers.
you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.
Most product managers start their day with half an hour or so in the analytics tools, understanding what's been happening in the past 24 hours. They're looking at sales analytics and usage analytics. They're looking at the results of A/B tests.
deep knowledge of the market and industry in which you're competing.
You will need to understand how for‐profit companies work and the main business key performance indicators (KPIs) that are important to your business—including, but not limited to, lifetime value of customers, average revenue per user/customer, customer acquisition cost, cost of sales, and contribution margins, among others.
For larger companies, especially, it's typical to have one or more teams that provide common services to the other product teams. We often label these teams common services, core services, or platform teams, but they primarily reflect the architecture.
the second inconvenient truth is that, even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, it typically takes several iterations to get the execution of this idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value that management was hoping for.
Make sure the team views it as their product, not just your product.
We're trying to show them the value of what we're building. A demo is not training, and it's not a test. It's a persuasive tool. Get really, really good at it.
Spending some personal time with every last person on the team pays off big in their level of motivation and, as a result, in the velocity of the team. It's worth your time.
we don't want to release something that's not ready for prime time and risk hurting our customers and damaging our brand.
The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)
our own experiences,
Dogfooding
Some companies require significant rigor and analysis, and others just leave it to the product team's judgment.
Regulation may play a role
opportunity assessment
customer letter
startup canvas
you describe them in the format of a customer letter written from the hypothetical perspective of one of your product's well‐defined user or customer personas.
Make sure you release the delivered product to these people before the general release, and make sure they are live and happy before the release. When you launch, they'll be ready to stand up for you.
The result of the program is a set of reference applications rather than reference customers. We focus on the successful applications created with our APIs.
It's important to emphasize that, for consumer products, we will need to supplement this program with much broader testing of our product ideas—typically with people that have never been exposed to the product.
Sean Ellis test.
asking them how they'd feel if they could no longer use this product. (The choices are “very disappointed,” “somewhat disappointed,” “don't care,” and “no longer relevant because I no longer use.”). The general rule of thumb is that if more than 40 percent of the users would be “very disappointed,” then there's a good chance you're at product/market fit.
The idea is for the developer to write just enough code to be able to address the feasibility risk.
User prototypes are simulations.
The main purpose of a live‐data prototype is to collect actual data so we can prove something,
People say all kinds of things and then go do something different.
When creating a live‐data prototype, our engineers don't handle all the use cases. They don't address internationalization and localization work, they don't tackle performance or scalability, they don't create the automated tests, and they only include instrumentation for the specific use cases we're testing.
It is definitely not okay for the product manager to tell the engineers that this is “good enough.”
You could (and should) talk to your customer service staff about the types of inquiries they routinely get and how they respond
address these business risks last because we don't want to stir up the organization unless we're confident it's worthwhile.
Recruiting Users to Test
You're testing the ideas in the prototype, you're not testing her. She can't pass or fail—only the prototype can pass or fail.
Act like a parrot.
fake door demand test.
it instead takes the user to a special page that explains that you are studying the possibility of adding this new feature, and you are seeking customers to talk to about this. The page also provides a way for the user to volunteer (by providing their e‐mail or phone number, for example).
landing page demand test.
Most of the time an A/B test with 1 percent or less of the customers exposed is fine for this.
As product manager, you need to make sure you are at every single qualitative value test.
Your contribution to the team comes from experiencing as many users as possible, first hand, interacting with and responding to your team's ideas.
Here is the core set for most tech products:
A discovery sprint is a one‐week time box of product discovery work, designed to tackle a substantial problem or risk your product team is facing.
The goal is that over time (it can take as long as a year), the organization moves its focus from specific features launching on specific dates to business results.
compelling product vision
