Every individual has a different personality, core principles, beliefs, process, and attitudes similarly; every product management has a different style of working on a product.
Being a product person, you should be versatile to work with various industry products; what abides with you is how you manage any product idea or product and launch it in the market.
As an early product manager, I would like to write my philosophy and evolve this blog page with my earning experience.
Why is product philosophy important?
Every product idea needs a clear path to result as a building product which meets the customers need. The process of building a successful product depends on the style of product management. The style of work every product managers follows is called philosophy. Product Philosophy is the core principle, process and attitude a product manager follows for building a product in general.
As for a product, the roadmap is important; for a product manager, product philosophy is important to be a great product leader in building a great product.
My Product Philosophy
Philosophy1: The Basics: Understanding your customer
I believe in understanding the basics in obsessing over what the customer of my product needs in the first place. To start working on a new product or feature starts with knowing the need, knowing the problem of my customer. The more you understand your users, the more you understand what they need and what they don't need in the product; this process helps you decide what should and shouldn’t be included in your product.
To ensure your product is the right fit for your customer, you should not only focus on the happy cases, but you should also look for what your customer would not like to see in your product.
Once I have clear product research done, I use the tool Value Proposition Canvas to evaluate my product analysis; this tool I have explained in my other blog How to achieve product-market fit?
Philosophy2: Prioritization
Feature prioritization is crucial; it is planning out the sequence of features your scrum team will work on based on the product roadmap you define. It's essential to prioritize features so that you can develop a feature that will really give value to your product in the limited timeline.
Few tools which can be used for prioritization are:
- RICE
- Value vs Effort
- Kano model
- Story Mapping
- The MoSCoW Method
Philosophy3: Don’t overcomplicate.
I believe Simple Is Better; you always try to keep your product solution simple; the more we complicate, the more ambiguity and more chances of messing up the product development if the time frame is less. If something can be achieved with a simple solution, we should go for that approach.
Philosophy4: Communication
Being a Product person, I spend much of my time communicating ideas, plans, designs, and tasks to the teams. This includes everything from emails communicating decisions, presentations communicating product roadmaps, specs communicating product designs, and bug tickets communicating errors in the product. You have to be really strong at communication skills.
Philosophy5: Don’t be the boss
Product Managers are led by influence and not by authority. Hence, the key to having a high delivery scrum team is to be one of the team members, don’t try to be a boss and dominate the team with your thought; a healthy scrum environment helps deliver a great product.
Philosophy6: Be the first customer of your product
When your product is built, you should be the first user of the product; you should use the product in and out to understand whether or not the product solving your customer's problem and what new enhancement you can bring to the product customer retentions are maintained.
Philosophy7: See the unseen vision
I have realised the success of the product doesn't only depend on the question “what do customers want”? it is all about how as a product leader I am creating what customers want. Many a time, customers don’t know what they want or need until we as a product person show them what can be better for them in business. It is our prime role to forecast what will be better for customers, offer it to them, and figure out how to get them there.
“Customer love means two sides of the same coin to me. On one side is knowing your
customer and building fantastic experiences for them. Your dedication and passion to making their life easier and delighting them feeds into the other side. When approached this way, not only will you have a loyal user base, they will also be your strongest advocates and critics.”