India may be the land of spices…
…but the spiciest opinion in product management comes from Marty Cagan — the man behind Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed.
In this week of Lenny & Learn, I went down the path of questioning my existence- all thanks to Marty.
If no one has called him the father of modern product management, it’s a shame, as he is definitely like a father tough, brutally honest… and almost always right
Marty answers a very important question that comes across the minds of both tech and non-tech world- Who really is a product manager and what do they do?
The best product led companies work on four principles - Usable, Feasible, Valuable & Viable.
Now, usable & feasible are what designers and developers respectively are responsible for, but the valuable i.e. Is the company going to make money and the viable i.e do customers need it, are the top most if not only responsibilities of product managers.
Product managers need to think about problems, but they need to think more about solutions. Solutions that are not a list of features but those that create value. They focus on outcomes and not on output.
To loosely explain Output vs Outcome-
Output is the count For ex: number of features, number of campaigns, number of widgets etc and
Outcome are the changes that result from the outputs i.e. Increased user engagement because of a feature, Increased sales because of a campaign etc.
Understanding this concept, actually made me understand what makes someone a great product manager:
They really know about the users and customers (Meet X customers before making a decision)
They are an expert in data of how product is really used, sales analytics, marketing analytics
They know the industry, the market in which business operates in and more
They know the different parts of business- how is it marketed? How is it paid for? What are the complaints, regulatory requirements?
The purpose of knowing and doing these is to innovate, make a valuable and viable product, but most importantly be able to approve or improve a prototype in the shortest period of time.
The ability to innovate at the optimal speed is what differentiates a great company from the rest, and product managers are at the centre of that world.
If I have to summarise, all Marty’s sessions, SVPG’s blogs- It would be that
Product managers are solving
What is just now possible
For real users or customers
In the ways that helps the business.
And to do this the best and the only way is for them to have:
Unencumbered access to users and customers
Unencumbered access to engineers
Unencumbered access to stakeholders
These sessions shook me (I am sure it did Lenny too), but sometimes you need tough love to do your best work.
P.S: I would recommend Teresa Torres book- Continuous Discovery Habits, which comes highly recommended by Mighty Marty.
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