Product Management
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The diagnosis - framing the challenge
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The guiding policy - the approach to dealing with the issues in the diagnosis
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Coherent Actions - the actions, resource commitments, and policies needed to carry out the guiding policy
Some of the best advice I ever received from a manager:
“Hope? I get to ‘hope’. You need a plan.”
Make sure you always have a plan.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, you don’t just write product specs and plot roadmaps as a product manager.
You’re also a storyteller. You create narratives that inspire your team and excite your clients about the future you’re collectvely building.
As a product manager some of the most important time you spend is talking to users or poring over feedback to uncover their most pressing challenges. Then you prioritize solutions to address those issues.
That’s how you make sure you’re delivering real value.
It’s about being prepared and staying agile in a fluid environment. Think about the future. Anticipate challenges. Identify potential risks before they become problems.
“Listening is the engine of ingenuity. It’s difficult to understand desires and detect problems, much less develop elegant solutions, without listening.”
-Kate Murphy (no relation 😁)
#Quotes
“It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.”
-Paul Graham
#Quotes
“The most effective communicators pause before they speak and ask themselves: Why am I opening my mouth?”
-Charles Duhigg
#Quotes
“Users don’t evangelize to their friends because they like the product, they evangelized their friends because they like their friends.”
-Kathy Sierra
#Quotes
A good strategy (according to Rumelt) has 3 parts:
Strategy is a cohesive response to an important challenge (Richard Rumelt).
This is a phenomenal distillation of the concept.
“Be careful not to overcomplicate your systems to the point where you can only maintain them when you are at your peak of mental clarity.”
-the David Allen Company
#Quotes
Remember:
Empathize with your clients.
Understand their needs as thoroughly as possible before proposing any solutions.
Always back your recommendations with evidence.
“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.”
-Kent Beck
#Quotes
There are no silver bullets
“Every tool you use impacts your abilities while using that tool. It increases some capabilities while decreasing others.
For example, a chimp fishing for ants with a stick can’t use her hand for another purpose while holding that stick.”
-David Kadavy
Tools perform specific functions, ideally useful ones.
Good tools perform their functions efficiently and are often cheaper, faster, simpler, and/or better than alternatives.
Great tools are transformative. Notable examples include sharpened stones, metal lathes, maps, and alphabets.
The proverbial hammer is great for driving steel nails into wood. But even the best hammer can’t help if the blueprints are wrong.
You say you want your product managers to write better user stories? Changing your word processor won’t help much.
Tools don’t magically fix broken processes, dysfunctional leadership, misaligned incentives, or training gaps.
See also:
There will be special moments in your career as a product manager.
You will meet and collaborate with remarkable people.
Working together, you will somehow manage to make the world just a little bit better than the way you found it.
Cherish these times.
Your career journey as a product manager is yours to shape.
(One might argue it’s really your most important product!)
Knowing when it might be time to pursue new avenues is crucial for your continued growth and learning.
Stagnation benefits no one.
Maya Angelou said it best:
“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Remember to share your knowledge, mentorship, and support whenever you can.
Authentic, meaningful relationships are the goal.
Children learn to walk by falling over and over again.
Experiments fail more often than not.
This is how we expand the scope of our understanding and knowledge.
Remind yourself to be bold.
Change is the necessary ingredient for all progress.
I cannot stress this enough.
Make sure you’re working on the right things before you start working even harder at them.
Want a big change in your results?
Consider that you may need a big change in your approach first.