Every product has a lifecycle of Introduction, growth , maturity and decline.With digital disruption in the market place it is very critical that we design products that stay in the growth phase for a longer period of time.

To achieve that level of confidence and to build products in that space we as product managers have to focus on a few key principals before we plan on getting the next thing in the marketplace.The four major principals we generally go by are Vision, Strategy, Team and Rapid learning.

Vision:  Astro Teller, the leader of Alphabet’s research and development firm X, is widely recognized for employing moonshots as a strategy. In his view, 10x is easier than 10 percent.When you aim for 10x, we are suddenly forced to rely on bravery and creativity. This holds true not only for next-generation products like driverless cars or Hyper-loop but also for more conventional businesses like e-commerce marketplaces. Moonshot thinking starts with picking a big problem: something huge, long-held, or global in scale. The next step is to articulate a radical solution—a solution that would solve the problem if it could somehow exist, even if the product or service sounds like it’s straight out of a sci-fi story.  These great dreams coupled with a strategy to implement them are called a vision and to be a successful product manager we not only need to dream big but also have a strategy in place to ensure those dreams are put to work.

Strategy: A Strategy of the company can be implemented in various forms. From positioning your product in the market place to developing a customer journey map for their experience inside a store, both can be strategies that can define how the product will be rated.At a time when the world considered electric and hybrid vehicles to be small and less powerful,Tesla positioned itself as an electric sports car company and that strategy worked very well for them.Tesla avoided comparing itself to other electric or hybrid cars , like the chevy volt or the Toyota Prius and created a new class of its own.

Team: One of the most important things that directly impact a product managers performance is his team , so it is very critical that as Product Managers we make sure that our teams are well formed , have a clear vision and a defined set of goals. Having said this it is also important to understand how we handle workload and scale up teams.An example of a midsize company which won a multi million dollar contract immediately turned to hiring , and 500 job offers were released in the first week alone.Within 6 months it became clear that hiring compromises (quality of engineers, language compatibility, cultural fit, and more)had caused irreparable damage to team formation. Many thought leaders talk about forming rich , cross-functional teams.While this is often a great vision, in practice , most companies find changes in structure to be intensely challenging.Breaking down silos using teams is a very powerful and effective means to gain speed, but this action must be approached delicately, as it will always be politically challenged.

Rapid Learning: A simple , solitary tweet prompted Tesla to release a new feature in just six days. On December 10, 2016 , a twitter user wrote, “@elonmusk the San Mateo supercharger is always full with idiots who leave their Tesla for hours even if already charged.”  Musk responded from his account within hours, “You’re right.This is becoming an issue.Super-charging sports are meant for charging , not parking.Will take action. Just six days later , Tesla announced a new policy at supercharger stations across the US designed to correct the issue.

For publicly traded corporations, a single tweet about a product issue is unlikely to receive a response , let alone from the CEO. But such a response not only eliminates unnecessary damages to the company but also ensures that by solving such problems it saves a lot of money to the company. The big picture for Product Management is based on these principles of Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile. With Design Thinking, the problem statement is identified by studying the behavior of customers in their native environment. This helps Product Management identify experiments or hypotheses to be tested. Lean Startup techniques help create multiple iterations of tests using a build-measure-learn loop. The objective is to learn quickly, so Product Management can identify the core set of metrics to be evaluated.Build is based on using Agile software development principles to take the entire product through quick customer feedback loops.Out of confusion, many companies only apply Agile to building software, but Product Management helps create the overall culture of innovation.

Product Takeoff by Navjot Singh, Kamal Manglani

Product Takeoff made it to the Best Product Management Books of All Time

Happy to announce that , “Product Takeoff: The Art of Innovative Product Management”, made it to BookAuthority’s Best Product Management Books of All Time:https://bookauthority.org/books/best-product-management-books?t=zcsmcc&s=award&book=1600052797
BookAuthority collects and ranks the best books in the world, and it is a great honor to get this kind of recognition. Thank you for all your support!
The book is available for purchase on Amazon.