post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Podcast

How to build the right product culture during transformation – Joca Torres (Product Consultant)

Career

Why self-care is your secret weapon as a product manager

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Context, intent, change, purpose, constraints – a model for communicating requirements

5 difficult conversations and how to have them

DoorDash eats Deliveroo while OpenAI makes its biggest buy: This week’s news roundup

Why great product managers think like therapists

Tools and techniques to scale product teams – Charlotte King (Lead Product Manager, eBay)

Christian Bonilla is the founder of UserMuse, which connects product and UX teams with hard-to-find subjects for user testing and product feedback. He writes regularly for UserMuse and Fast Company.

Christian Bonilla

Christian Rudder, co-founder of dating site OkCupid, has learned a lot about online dating behaviour. As a data scientist, he’s also been in the unique position of being able to observe how people behave in the dating world when no one is watching them. The insights in his book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J1IQUX8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1">Dataclysm</a> are fascinating, the one that jolted me because of its relevance to product management the most is the advantage of being polarising.
To help tune the matching algorithms to fit their preferences, OkCupid users rate other members&#8217; looks on a 1-5 scale ( where 5 = most attractive). Rudder saw that the users who received the most engagement weren&#8217;t the unanimous 4s and 5s, but rather the ones who had an equal number of 1 and 5 votes. In the face of disagreement, people tend to feel even more passionately about their preferences. On the other hand, being unanimously voted a 3 by users was the worst way to generate interest. A rating of 3 is “meh,” and meh is a death sentence.
I&#8217;ve found myself returning to Rudder&#8217;s premise of &#8220;death by a thousand mehs&#8221; periodically as a product manager and especially as a founder. Great products feel like they were designed by someone who knows exactly what your job is or what you’re trying to do. <a href="https://www.expensify.com/">Expensify</a> feels like it was designed by people who really understand how much filing dozens of receipts used to suck. <a href="https://www.squarespace.com/?channel=pbr&amp;subchannel=go&amp;source=branded&amp;subcampaign=(branded_branded-squarespace(only)-us-search_squarespace_e)&amp;variation=169749255487&amp;gclid=CK66zoqCqtECFcpMDQodIXQAbw">Squarespace</a> feels like it anticipated every question a novice would have when building a website.<a href="https://www.quora.com/Is-SAP-Germanys-revenge-for-losing-WWII"> SAP does not</a>.
<h2>No one Wants you Here, Frankenstein</h2>
Products must be designed with a target user in mind. Making the product perfect for the target user necessarily means it can’t be perfect for every user, but companies often forget this. The desires to appeal to everyone or keep up with the Joneses by copying your competitors’ features can be hard to resist. Those temptations are amplified in start-ups where strategy is more fluid, or when a marquee client wants a new feature before they’ll sign a deal.
Diluting your user persona, overriding your roadmap to win deals, and aping competitors’ features is what turns your product into Frankenstein monster. A product that tries to be something for everyone ends up delighting no one &#8211; least of all the people trying to market and sell them. They&#8217;re meh, no matter how much you dress them up. Meh doesn’t get a buyer excited. It’s a 5 out of 10, and frankly anything below a 9 rounds down to zero.
<h2>How to Ensure Your Product Stands for Something (not Everything)</h2>
There are a couple of key things product managers can do to keep their product focused and out of Frankenstein territory.
Advocate market research &#8211; The most important thing a product manager can do is understand the target customers&#8217; pain points and needs. More to the point, you need to understand the people whose problems you’re solving so intimately that there’s no need to hedge by catering to everyone. When the company’s understanding of the customer is fuzzy, every adjacency starts to look attractive. By engaging with potential users directly, listening to their feedback, and observing how they do their jobs, you’ll uncover the real problems worth solving. That&#8217;s what gives you the confidence in your product roadmap to say &#8220;no&#8221; to a segment you have no need to chase.
As we found from our<a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/the-biggest-challenge-for-product-managers/"> product manager survey results</a>, PMs often don’t have the time (or ability) to do market research. We founded<a href="https://www.usermuse.com/"> UserMuse</a> because this is a real problem, especially on the enterprise side. If you don’t invest in understanding your target customers (not just your current ones) inside and out, your odds of making a product they’ll love start heading toward zero.
Get to agreement on the product principles &#8211; I&#8217;m borrowing this concept from product guru<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Inspired-Create-Products-Customers-Love-ebook/dp/B001AQ95UY"> Marty Cagan</a>, among others. Product principles are useful for getting everyone to agree on priorities that extend beyond a single release. Cagan defines them as &#8220;a public declaration of your beliefs and intentions&#8221;. I think of them as the strategic foundation of your product. For example, the product principles for a team developing a new e-reader might look like this:
<ul>
<li>Reading is an activity best done slowly and with zero distractions</li>
<li>It should be as easy to read a web page as it is to read a book</li>
<li>Image clarity is as important to the reading experience as the words themselves</li>
<li>Functionality that supports the reading experience cannot be dependent on WiFi or 4G connectivity</li>
</ul>
Sticking to your product principles (and knowing when to revise them) is part of the art of management, but you can see how these transcend any single feature. They are the core insights you learn about your market turned into a framework for evaluating all future product enhancements.
The alternative is<a href="https://www.usermuse.com/blog/ron-swanson-product-management/"> letting your product drift into mediocrity</a>.

core/freeform

What good product design looks like – Miguel Fernandez (VP of Product Design, Slack)

10x Product X Design: Product and research team collaboration by Jane Austin

Learnings from London: What is it like to hold Google in your hand?

Learnings from London: How to build a billion dollar app

Product Systems: How to manufacture lightning in a bottle by Oji Udezue

Product management meets UX design by Tanmay Goel, Emi Kwon, Simran Kaur

Designing a sustainable future by Leyla Acaroglu

Making Hard Product Decisions for All the Right Reasons

Product Vision 2020

The Importance of Empathy, By Jack Sheppard

Why Your Product Must Stand for Something

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Hyderabad

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Helsinki

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Lomé

ProductTank Wellington

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Canberra

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank Doha

ProductTank Tel Aviv-Yafo

ProductTank Baku

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Richmond

ProductTank Cluj-Napoca

ProductTank Zagreb

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank München

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Oxford

ProductTank Madrid

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Portland

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Chicago

ProductTank Austin

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Montevideo

ProductTank São Paulo

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Gdansk

ProductTank Stuttgart

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Chennai

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Fribourg

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Zürich

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Florianópolis

ProductTank Tallinn

ProductTank Denver

ProductTank San Francisco

ProductTank Sheffield

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Valletta

ProductTank Vancouver

ProductTank Milano

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Belfast

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Seattle

ProductTank Lausanne

Product Management Foundations BST

Product Management Foundations ET

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Bielefeld

Communication & Alignment BST

Communication & Alignment ET

ProductTank Frankfurt

ProductTank Bonn

Why Your Product Must Stand for Something

Christian Bonilla

Read more