New Product Managers: Focus on These Three Fundamentals to Set Yourself up For Success
Don’t get bewildered by all the tools and sophisticated techniques of product professionals. Focus on these three to really take off.
1. Structured Thinking About Problems
The biggest gap I see in newbie and non-product professionals is the lack of structured thinking about problems. Instead, they tend to reach for solutions too fast.
The exciting solutions which spring to mind, and generate immediate excitement, are frequently wrong.
Why? Because the first solution that springs to mind tends to be a bigger thing than is really needed. These ideas try to bite off more than they can chew.
This is what I’d call macro-problem solving rather than a micro-problem solving. In doing so we fail to understand properly the micro-problems that cumulatively make up the macro-problem.
A great way of thinking about this is a chain. All steps (links) in the chain are vital. You can’t improve the outcome if one part of the chain fails.
To solve the overall problem you must know which steps in the chain are most strongly contributing to the poor outcome or problem, and identify how you can improve the performance of each step or link.
Of course, you may choose to replace several links at once, but you won’t know if that is the right approach until you know what is happening on each link. You also know that replacing several links is a bigger job, and bigger jobs carry bigger risk.
Looking just at the macro results in over-engineered solutions, obese MVPs, and premature strong attachment to a solution design that may not solve brilliantly one or more of the problems underneath the overarching need or issue.
Let’s take an example.
Say you are a Netflix product manager, looking after the recommendations capability. Imagine a stakeholder presents an idea to enable recommendations from user friends to enter the feed of those users i.e. a friend-list-sharing tool. They should build this, by the way. They can pay me later.
This is a cool idea, even if I do say so myself. That is half the problem…
