How to develop your product sense
Learnings from our Product Management Showcase Event with Minnow
A career in product has become increasingly popular among university students. This is matched by an uptake of PM roles from start-ups to scale-ups and students upskilling through cohort-based learning. TBV ran a Product Management Panel showcasing how effectively the art of Product Management differs across the start-up to scale-up phase at Canva and SafetyCulture vs large corporations like Google. The product journeys of Harry Hamilton (Founder of Minnow), Sophia Witherington and Faiza Harji were also followed and their respective learnings were shared. Here are the key learnings:
Solve the customer problem and create business value
A product manager’s role is to create value for customers, solve their most important problems, and create business value quantified in profitability metrics or user growth. By collaborating with engineers and designers, PMs discover customer problems, build and iterate products to address those problems in a triad or with a team.
The problems product managers are solving revolve around the What, Why, and Who:
1) What you’re building or why the problems you’re solving are important, and how they align with the business
2) Who are the customers you care about and which customer problems should you tackle
3) Collaborate with the team on the how (a common misconception is that a product manager comes up with how to solve a problem. Rather PMs facilitate the process by working with engineering and design talent to collectively come up with the solution.)
Product management varies according to the size of the company and the product in development. It is all driven by size, as a large company looks quite different from an early-stage startup finding PMF whereas a mature product will look drastically different from a brand-new product.
There is no linear path into Product Management
There are multiple pathways into product management. With our three panelists they each followed their own respective paths. Faiza came from a strategy consulting background with an undergraduate study in business where Sophie studied psychology. It is common for PMs to come from backgrounds in architecture, sustainability, or computer science. PMs can be data-driven, design-driven, focused on growth. Ultimately, finding a particular edge becomes a strength.
The same applies to building a product team. PMs can have vastly different profiles and practices. It’s important to have a mix of these various skillsets as you want to represent each of these diverse profiles.
You never want to be the smartest person in the room.
Engineers = Code, Designers = Design and PMs should really be communicating
Communication and influence are critical to developing and honing your product craft. The key to product management is aligning processes and vision across teams and driving outcomes. PMs are effectively communicating with users and influencing internal team members and stakeholders through understanding incentives. It is impossible for PMs to pull the lever of working many hours, as they aren’t typically creating designs and coding. Therefore, this necessitates the PM to rely on the triad to execute with their strengths.
Have a founder mindset
Be formidable! This is ultimately what separates good PMs from great PMs. Good PMs consider their product flow from beginning to end, understands their funnel, and quantifies metrics. Great PMs think and operate like business owners and understand that building a product is one of the greatest levers available to help customers and grow the business. There are a number of levers around product to create value. It is possible to do this by forming strategic partnerships, implementing marketing channels as you can help customers find what you are building. Ultimately, great product managers blur the lines between ownership and management.
Other differentiating points:
1. The ability to ask the right questions at the right time.
2. Striking a balancing act between product being an art and a science: forging an intersection between the creative vs pragmatic approach to building.
3. Taking a big picture approach rather than thinking and operating in silos. Be curious and don’t confine yourself to a box.
Structure your product workflow around deep work and learning velocity
Context switching gets real…
It is crucial to block out focus time for deep work that is critical to moving the needle. vs. getting caught up in the meeting cycle. Discard the meta and unproductive conversations, and work on solutions that yield results.
When it comes to the PM workflow, the question arises how can the benefits and productive conversations be shared from one team across four other teams. Increasing learning velocity is essential to a PM’s workflow particularly noting the divergence and convergence phase of ideation, development, and iteration. It’s all about solving a customer problem that could be worked on collaboratively rather than individually.
In the divergence stage, team members work independently to produce their own insights. Independent results and solutions are discussed during the convergence phase where product decisions are made collectively.
Diverge, then converge
Develop product sense through observation, deconstruction and connection
Product sense is the ability to consistently craft products and existing features that will positively impact users. Connecting the dots between your information diet, features of apps you’ve used and extracting relevant learnings from conversations with fellow PMs. Your product sense develops as your understanding of how products work deepens with time.
1. Deconstruct an aspect of a new app every week: download it and use it. Ask yourself: what were the peaks and troughs, what delighted you, what frustrated you? What are the common user flows and key drivers?
2. Read broadly and be conscious of your information intake. Don’t just read product 101 books, increase your breadth of knowledge and scope by reading up on different cultures, psychology, languages and science. By broadening your horizons, you’re able to arrive at solutions through a different lens.
3. Learn and connect with what other product managers are doing. The power of a cohort ultimately drives a lot of the information-sharing and insights gained. Landing in a product role can feel insular and isolating. By taking an active step to hear how other PMs are solving similar problems is the most effective way in building product sense.
Lenny also writes an informative piece on the craft of developing product sense.
Product management differs drastically across the board
The scope and ownership. Early-stage product management looks very different in early-stage startups to large scale-ups and corporations. When you’re in a team of 20 people, resources are scarce (you could be more operationally driven and doing everything apart from coding). If you aren’t from a CS background, you could be querying data, user-testing, being a product owner and part-time tax and compliance lawyer.
Comparatively, if you start at a mature organisation post-IPO, the need to do end-to-end PM is a lot less required as there is the luxury of resources. You have someone who can be dedicated to tax and compliance or a separate function of the organisation. There is a level of technical depth and core competency that is required. This allows for refined product management practices and for PMs to have the time to go deep and solve intricate product problems.
The reality of shipping a MVP: Speed should be the focus
This is particularly true during the build to ship to iterate phase. There are several conflicting takes and startup literature on what to prioritise when validating the customer problem- speed vs velocity vs direction. For founders validating and reiterating their MVPs, speed should be their initial focus. Speed without direction is ultimately futile in the long term. However, in the early stages, the odds of achieving success and increasing one’s surface area for luck to strike is significantly higher with speed. Dalton Caldwell also echoes this sentiment with Brex’s and Retool’s pivot and prototyping in the early days by talking to potential customers and users in rapid succession.
Ultimately to validate is to build confidence that the problem exists and that the problem matters. Writing a line of code can get very expensive. It’s about getting creative on how you can build confidence. Hence, the purpose of building an MVP is to learn and learn what you don’t know.
Whether you are an aspiring product manager, founder or a lover of products, developing a product sense appears to be the 7th sense of today’s world. Hone it, own it and work at it!
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