What will make you better than 99% of Product Managers today.

There are many ways to answer this question - I will try to keep it simple: Most of the top 1% of Product Managers are folks who get their team to focus on work that produces the maximum impact. In order to do this, top product managers gather data and interview enough users to have a clear understanding of the following questions:

Who - Who is your user? What do they care about in their day to day life? What kind of business are they involved in? How they think about themselves?

Why - Why do they need your product? Why can't they find a solution? Why do they find existing solutions frustrating? Why will they go through the trouble of learning/installing/deploying something new?

What - What will happen if the product is brought to market? How will the world of your customers change? How will the world of their customers change? How will the world in general change?

Relentless data mining, interviewing, focus groups and other methods will ultimately help provide a clear understanding of these questions. Once you can articulate these three questions, you will be ahead of 99% of Product Managers in the field.

-mb

PS: The question was originally answered on Quora here.

PPS: If you liked this post you might also like Zombie Products article as well.

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SDET / QA Engineer Interview Checklist

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team.

I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me!

SDE/T or QA Engineer interview checklist from Mike Borozdin
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