Principles of Product Management: How to Land a PM Job and Launch Your Product Career

by Peter Yang

A product manager’s job is to lead their team to build products that solve their customer’s most important problems. They do this by understanding the customer problem, identifying the right products to build, and executing with their team to bring the product to market.

Communicate Your Priorities Just as important as knowing which priorities to focus on, is communicating your priorities to others. This way, everyone has shared goals and expectations.

Similarly, use your weekly team meeting and daily stand-ups to align with your team on what the most important tasks are.

The majority of disagreements happen when people are not aligned on the why. Aligning on the why can help you avoid: Building a product when your team doesn’t know why they’re building it. Sharing data with executives when they don’t know why the data matters. Arguing about a product design when no one knows why the product matters to the customer.

Disagree and Commit Every decision has two phases: 1) gather and debate; and 2) commit and execute. During the first phase, if you genuinely believe that the decision is wrong and have the evidence to back it up, then disagree openly. It’s always easier to compromise with the decision-maker to avoid damaging a relationship, especially if that person is your manager or an executive. But your goal should be to find the truth no matter what, even when doing so is uncomfortable.

What I realized through this process is that you have to think about how the work you’re doing ties back to the company’s strategic goals. You also need to share and evangelize your ideas early and often to reach alignment.

How Do We Know That This Problem Exists? Understanding if the customer problem exists is hard work. This work could include: Talking to at least five customers about the problem. Diving into existing metrics and research about the problem. Discussing the problem with experts in your organization (e.g. user research, support). Running a simple A/B test to validate if the problem exists. Researching competitors to understand how they’re tackling the problem.