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The majority of disagreements happen when people are not aligned on the why. Aligning on the why can help you avoid:
Include your team and other stakeholders in understanding the customer problem and selecting the right goal metric to grow.
When you get into disagreements with others, remember that your job as a product manager is to find the truth, not to be right all the time.
So instead of going into a discussion with a goal of “How can I convince this person to see things my way?” I now have a goal of “How can we discover the truth together?”
There’s no shame in changing your mind to get closer to the truth.
“Your bias for action too often comes across as impatience. This manifests in the form of curt behavior in meetings and dismissiveness of other people’s ideas.”
I was so focused on moving fast that my teammates felt left behind.
“You listen to everyone to make the product better and take people’s feedback to heart. Even if you disagree, you document the different viewpoints and the rationale. People respect that you have low ego, a lot of patience, and take time to understand different trade-offs.”
To lead others as a product manager, you first need to lead yourself. Since you have no real authority over anyone as a PM, you’ll only succeed if people want to work with you.
Based on my experience, people usually have one significant weakness that’s a common thread through most of their past setbacks. For example, I struggle with being impatient. My impatience has surfaced in past mistakes like becoming frustrated with colleagues or leaving good jobs too early.
The more feedback and perspectives you get, the closer you can get to building a great product.
everyone has the same intentions and just wants to build the right product for customers. We’re all coming from a good place, wanting to build something great;
The more senior you become, the more you have to lead by example.
also think great product managers are very inclusive and collaborative. As a PM, your main job is to advocate for the customer. If you always come from that point, it takes the emotions or need to be defensive out of debates.
I think Steve Covey’s book The Speed of Trust tackles this question well. Covey provides four cores to build trust: 1) Integrity; 2) Intent; 3) Capabilities; and 4) Results.
Product managers build products that solve customer problems and help their company grow. They do this by following the “understand, identify, and execute” product development loop.
clear OKRs (objectives and key results);
Understand: What is the customer problem that we want to solve? Identify: What product should we build to solve the problem? Execute: What is the most efficient way to get the product shipped?
Understand: What Is the Customer Problem That We Want to Solve?
Your goal in the understand phase is to craft a problem statement that answer three questions: What is the customer problem? How do we know that this problem exists? Why is it critical that we solve this problem? This is the most critical phase of product development because many products fail by not solving a real customer problem.
Identify: What Product Should We Build to Solve the Problem? Your goal in the identify phase is to define a product that will solve the customer problem that you’ve prioritized with your team.
Why Is “Understand, Identify, and Execute” a Loop? “Understand, identify, and execute” is a loop because your job is never done. After shipping a product, you need to go back to the understand phase to determine if the product addressed the customer problem and moved the goal metric. Each pass through the loop is a chance for your team to get better at understanding the problem, identifying the solution, and executing to bring the product to market.
Amazon has a famous obsession: “Start with the customer and work backward.” But how does this actually work?
As Jeff Bezos describes:1 The #1 thing that has made us successful by far is an obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to the competitor.
Is growing the metric good for customers and the company? Is the metric easy to understand and measure? Can my team directly grow this metric?
You can’t define a great product if your team doesn’t have an overall mission, vision, and strategy: Mission is why your team exists. It’s the big, audacious goal that inspires your team to succeed. Vision is what the world will look like once you make significant progress toward your mission. Strategy is how your team will achieve your mission and vision.
Understand the 3Cs First: Customer, Company, and Competition
(in that priority order) is a prerequisite.
Unlike roadmaps and individual product requirements, your mission, vision, and strategy should rarely change.
A great mission and vision has three traits: It solves a real customer problem. It inspires your team. It helps people make decisions.
In his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Richard Rumelt
To summarize, a great mission, vision, and strategy gives people on your team a shared purpose (why), a picture of what success looks like (what), and a plan to make that vision a reality (how).
Andy Grove created the objective and key results framework when he was Intel’s CEO in the 1980s. According to Andy, an objective is a qualitative goal that your team wants to achieve, and key results are quantitative measures of progress toward the objective.
Product Requirement Document PRDs come in various templates. I like to include six main sections: Header Problem Goal Requirements Design FAQ
The Elements of Style, Strunk & White
Invest in relationships. I didn’t appreciate this early in my career and I used to think company morale events were a waste of time. But now I realize how important it is to build genuine relationships with the people you work with. You need to understand where they’re coming from and build rapport. It’ll make resolving conflicts and driving results much easier.
Product managers early in their career have a belief that they need to constantly defend their ideas. A better mentality is to be a truth seeker.
Truth seekers use every opportunity to find out what the truth is. They listen carefully to other people’s viewpoints instead of quickly trying to defend their own. They realize that listening to others will help them refine their ideas and get closer to the truth.
We'll then prep you for the three most common types of PM interviews—product sense, execution, and behavioral—with
For example, my strength was domain expertise in live streaming from working at Facebook. As a result, Twitter was willing to take a bet on me to manage a similar video product.
Often, I’ve found that strengths taken too far can become weaknesses. For example, I received negative feedback in a performance review because I had a strong sense of urgency (a strength) that too often came off as impatience with others (a weakness).
The benefit of joining an early-stage company is that you’ll join a small team with one overriding goal: to find and retain customers. You’ll wear multiple hats, from engineer to designer to sales and more, and it could be thrilling to work with your team to iterate toward product-market fit.
We use these same six attributes to evaluate PMs on the job as well: Product Sense Product Execution Leadership Communication Collaboration Domain Fit We also look for PMs who have a growth mindset—people who are always looking to learn and improve.
