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.

Comments

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 If you like this checklist you might want to check out these posts: Emotional Intelligence in Software Teams and Good-bye manual tester, hello crowdsourcing!

Code versus Configuration

At Ethos we are building a distributed mortgage origination system and in mortgage there is a lot of different user types with processes that vary depending on geography. One of our ongoing discussions is about how much of the logic resides in code vs. being in a workflow system or configuration. After researching this topic for a bit, I have arrived at a conclusion that the logic should live outside of code very infrequently, which might come as a surprise to a lot of enterprise software engineers. Costs of configuration files and workflow engines First thing that I assume is true is that having any logic outside of the code has costs associated with it. Debugging highly configurable system involves not only getting the appropriate branch from source control, you also need to make sure that the right configuration values or the database. In most cases this is harder for programmers to deal with. In many FinTech companies where the production data is not made readily acce

Intuitive Programming - Comments

Comments are a topic of vibrant discussion. Ever since programmers could leave some text in the program that was ignored by the machine the debate started: “what’s a good comment, what’s a bad comment, why comment?” There are endless instructions to programmers that say many of the following things: 1) Describe your function! 2) Don’t write in the comment what you wrote in the code. 3) Tell people why you are doing what you are doing. What I think has been missing from this discourse is the audience for comments and through those audiences there is intent. The code is being read, skimmed or analyzed by people and tools. So what are the audiences and reading modes? 1) Maintaining and enhancing the code 2) Skimming through the entire module or file to figure out what the overall structure is 3) Reviewing the test files to check out the test coverage and edge cases 4) Seeing the docstrings of functions while being in a separate file altogether 5) Reviewi

Software, Team and Strategy

Search This Blog