Going Zero to One : A Wanderer’s Notes on Product Research

When was the last time you reached out to a stranger on LinkedIn, hoping to tap into their understanding of an interesting new market? If you’re like many product managers, grown accustomed to leaning on existing customers or internal subject matter experts, that thought just sent a chill down your spine!

But the most interesting new ideas can’t be found within your office walls, they’re out there in the wooly wild of emerging markets.

Developing a new product in an emerging or rapidly-changing market – going zero to one – is dramatically different from building out a mature product or creating something new in a well-understood space. While the core product management skills of research and requirement design are shared in both situations, the importance of open-ended questions, the willingness to discard hypotheses, and to live in uncertainty while constantly experimenting can be so different as to paralyze even the best product manager.

To understand how inventing a zero-to-one product in an emerging space is different from developing for a well-understood market, let’s first talk about repeatability.

Repeatability is what turns a product into a business. The ability to sell what you’ve built to 80% of the prospects you can attract, using only your set of sales playbooks is the catalyst that enables infusion of capital to predictably deliver measured growth.

Late-stage startup development goals – operational mastery of your funnel metrics, pipeline efficiency, customer acquisition cost, cost of goods sold and net retention – are all gated on repeatability. It doesn’t make any sense to talk payback period, unit economics, or EBITA until you have repeatability.

So what’s the relationship between defining your product strategy in your market and achieving repeatability? It’s a sequential relationship, where building and executing your product strategy delivers product-market fit and enables you to start developing sales repeatability, and it is foundational in the lifecycle of a company, particularly in its early stages of growth.

Let’s define our terms.

1. Product-Market Fit (PMF): This refers to the stage where a company has validated that its product or service satisfies a strong demand in a specific target market. It’s the point where customers are not only willing to buy the product but are enthusiastic about it, leading to strong customer retention and organic growth through word-of-mouth referrals. Achieving PMF indicates that the product solves a real problem for a significant portion of the market.

2. Sales Repeatability: Once PMF is established, the next challenge is to build a repeatable and scalable sales process. Sales repeatability means that a company can predictably generate revenue by applying the same sales strategies, tactics, and processes across multiple customers. This involves creating consistent sales methodologies, refining the buyer journey, and ensuring that sales teams can replicate success without needing to reinvent the process for every new lead.

The key relationship attributes between PMF and Sales repeatability are dependency, efficiency, and scaling:

Dependency: Product-market fit is a prerequisite for achieving sales repeatability. Without a clear understanding that the product satisfies a market need, any sales process will likely be inconsistent or fail to scale. PMF ensures that there is demand; sales repeatability ensures that this demand can be systematically addressed and monetized.

Efficiency: Once PMF is attained, it becomes much easier to develop a sales strategy because the value proposition is clear, and customer feedback has validated the product’s relevance. The sales team can then focus on refining the messaging, targeting, and techniques to reach similar customers in a repeatable manner.

Scaling: When both PMF and sales repeatability are present, the company is in a strong position to scale. PMF ensures the product is wanted, and sales repeatability provides the mechanism to efficiently capture that demand on a larger scale, driving revenue growth.

To sum this up: product-market fit is about proving the product’s value, while sales repeatability is about scaling that value in a structured and predictable way.

PMF is essential to success for any product endeavor. This is no different when you’re looking for success in a new or rapidly-changing market – but the difficulty is far higher. Without an established customer base to survey, existing players to study, or even a well-defined market for analysts to report on, first-principles research and the hard work of developing relevant primary sources is a requirement

And a little flailing around on LinkedIn isn’t going to cut it – sorry folks, no shortcuts here!

So here’s a structured yet adaptable approach for developing a new product thesis in a poorly-defined market, given the uncertainties and complexities involved. Let’s outline the key elements for this process:

1. Gather Your Market Insights

Lean on early pioneers: Establish close connections with early adopters in your target space, allowing their feedback to guide initial directions. Engage with them through multiple rounds of discovery to refine your understanding and uncover questions you didn’t initially know to ask. Invest in building quick-and-dirty concepts, experiments, and mockups and orient your feedback processes to suss out the problems that are interesting to solve rather than the specifics of a given solution.

Broaden your research horizon: Recognize the limitations of relying solely on existing customers, as it can create a biased view of the market. To build a balanced picture, expand research to potential customers who aren’t engaged yet. Spend some of your demand generation resources driving traffic to your research programs, and engage with as many relevant people as possible, even if they’re not immediately actionable prospects.

And leverage the discussions that are happening outside of your own activities! Participate in community meetups, in online forums like StackOverflow and Reddit discussions, and at industry events and trade shows. Even industry blog comments can give a broader view of latent needs. Throughout this, be rigorous in your data collection – keep good notes, leverage AI transcription of meetings, link back to discussions, and constantly re-examine both your insights and the audience they’re derived from.

Finally, consider contributions you can make and experiments you can run in your target market, even (maybe especially) if they’re not a product you intend to sell – engaging with a community is much more meaningful if you’re offering to contribute, not just learn.

Scale your research efforts: As the need for quantitative and qualitative supporting data grows, consider formal survey research or UX-focused analysis to capture wider market insights systematically. Forums and conferences are great for conversations, but those anecdotes are not easily subjected to rigorous analysis.

2. Define Your Product Direction

Don’t be afraid to use intuitive decision-making: Base your product’s direction on a combination of intuitive understanding from research and technical discussions with engineering partners. This ensures that the solution aligns both with market needs and technical feasibility. Your target market isn’t going to be good at describing its ideal solution – you’ll need to use your understanding of the problem to invent interesting products, but you also need to stay grounded in technical reality.

Evaluate risks: Each new product involves distinct risks:

– Customer Relevance: Validate that the product concept resonates with a potential customer base. Mitigate the risk of building an exciting solution for a problem that isn’t important through interviews grounded in a prospective purchase.

– Feasibility of New Concepts: For novel or untested ideas, ensure that the team has clarity on the concept, expected outcomes, and technical capability to deliver.

– Resource and Timeline Management: Establish realistic timelines and resources, balancing the anticipated product development time against available bandwidth.

Set tactical milestones: To mitigate the risk of sinking too many resources into an impractical or unattractive product, set measurable milestones, such as early customer pilots, technological proofs-of-concept, or small wins with initial investments that confirm feasibility and value.

3. Set Priorities and Milestones

Establish early momentum: Resist the temptation to complete your product before sending it out into the world – you don’t need a complete solution to get feedback, just the kernel of value that activates your audience. Prioritize deliverables that establish a sense of early progress. Bring together cross-functional teams (product, engineering, design) to align on immediate goals that demonstrate velocity and validate the product concept. Nothing will energize (and validate!) your early work better than getting an early concept into the hands of real users.

Prioritize your roadmap through your vision: A clear north star vision is essential for aligning the roadmap. Establish guiding principles and strategic trade-offs that provide clarity for every roadmap discussion. This shared vision acts as the decision-making anchor and ensures that product decisions stay on course.

Plan collaboratively: Develop the roadmap in consultation with engineering, UX, and business teams:

– Product: Focus on customer and business value.

– UX: Ensure each milestone delivers a cohesive user journey.

– Engineering: Evaluate technical risks, confidence in deliverables, and realistic development timelines.

Communicate with your stakeholders: Regularly present the roadmap to leadership, ensuring alignment. When sharing externally, maintain a consistent narrative that conveys how the roadmap leads to the desired outcomes for customers and stakeholders.

4. Test and Validate

Use early feedback loops: Prioritize early and continuous feedback as a principle. Test hypotheses with users from the start using informal mock-ups, clickable prototypes, or API demonstrations. This allows for rapid learning and iteration, well before reaching a beta stage.

Invest in user behavior analysis: Observe user interactions closely—monitor what users do, identify pain points early, and be ready to adjust based on their success or difficulties.

Manage expectations: As you gather early feedback, control the narrative to avoid misinterpretations or unmet expectations among stakeholders, especially when testing is in ideation stages. A vocal minority can easily kill a seedling product, even over a misunderstanding.

5. Handle Inbound Requests

– Align using your strategy: Treat the roadmap as a living document while maintaining a consistent vision and strategy. Evaluate each inbound request on whether it aligns with this strategic vision, determining if it’s simply a premature idea or if it diverges from strategic priorities altogether.

– Balance customer influence: When handling requests from key customers, weigh their business impact and the potential need for custom work. Consider the future trade-offs, like tech debt, that may arise if requests require substantial customization.

6. Manage Technical Debt

– Understand Long-Term Impact: As a product manager, cultivate awareness of the technical debt implications of certain decisions, particularly custom requests. Often, early decisions have long-term impact on your ability to sustain development. Evaluate if taking on tech debt for one customer aligns with the broader roadmap and, if so, plan for how and when to address it in the future.

Tying it all together

In essence, building a new product for an unclear market involves a flexible approach grounded in deep customer understanding, iterative testing, and a well-communicated strategy. Balancing these elements can help shape a viable product that resonates with a still-emerging market while remaining adaptable to new insights and challenges.

And developing your market and product hypotheses using the knowledge you’ll collect this way is your best shot at finding product / market fit and successful growth. Now get out there and get researching!

Flow state

I really love coffee. My favorite thing in hotels is the ubiquitous little pod-driven espresso makers that let me enjoy a cup before I’m actually awake. Despite owning a “real” espresso machine, I’ve learned a lot from surviving international travel: I keep a Nespresso CitiZ coffeemaker next to my bed.

I adore this machine. It’s shiny chrome, an exact duplicate of one I used years ago in the penthouse of a gorgeous parisian hotel decorated in demure, luxurious furniture and a view of the Eiffel tower, and it makes perfectly delightful coffee using recyclable aluminum pods.

It’s made thousands of cups of coffee since I bought the thing in 2014. Long out of warranty, Nespresso has disavowed it and won’t provide service or sell me parts, but I have had little trouble with it over a decade, which I consider an exceptional lifespan for a consumer device.

Recently though, it started to cry for help. What once had been full cups of coffee now came out as a bare ounce of tepid brown stuff, with both the Espresso and Lungo buttons producing identical results.

I can’t tell you how heartbroken I felt. This is a cherished little machine! I didn’t want it to be broken. Instantly I swore to fix whatever was ailing it.

As an experienced engineer, I knew exactly what to do: I googled “nespresso citiz not brewing full cup”. Google’s dubious AI Search summarized the advice of a dozen sketchy fix-it sites: try reprogramming the cup volume (that’s a thing my CitiZ can do, set a user-defined pour), or try a hard reset by holding down the Lungo button while powering on (sensible, I suppose) or even, hey, check to make sure there’s enough water in the tank (lol).

Button-mashing didn’t work – unsurprisingly, as if it was just the volume config, the coffee probably wouldn’t be coming out tepid. A few reddit posts hinted at hard water scale causing this exact problem, and that descaling fixes it – it’s insights like these that has AI companies begging Reddit to take their money for a training-data license – but while I sidestepped the DIY vinegar (too corrosive for the aluminum thermoblock!) and used the pricey Nespresso descaling solution, it didn’t help one bit.

However, a clue! – just like the coffee mode, the machine wouldn’t run a full tank of descaler through either, but instead dispensed a measured ½ cup before halting. I could get a tank through by repeatedly triggering the cycle, but that’s not expected behavior – and it dispensed a precise, consistent amount each time.

That seemed like some kind of system behavior – failure or otherwise – rather than a faltering pump or a clogged pipe. Software behaves in repeatable failure modes like this far more often than worn-out moving parts.

The CitiZ isn’t really that complicated inside. Despite using extremely sophisticated injection-molded components, it’s mechanically simple: there’s a pump, an inline thermoblock, a brewing unit, a flow meter, and a logic board. That’s it. Given that the mechanicals worked, but the system was halting early, I guessed it had to be either the logic board or the flow meter. And on the principle of do the easiest thing first, I pulled out the little flow meter.

It’s so cute! The three pins told me it’s a Hall-effect sensor, with a little spinny bit and a magnet inside. And it didn’t seem user-serviceable, so a little searching revealed that this is actually a jellybean part that is in all sorts of machinery, comes in multiple variants and is available on eBay as a spare part for several brands of coffeemaker.

Mine didn’t seem to do anything when water flowed through the inlet, like it was stuck open. Theory: the logic board, getting no pulses from the meter, probably cuts off the pump after a timeout period to avoid burning it out, and similarly throttles down the thermoblock to prevent overheating. (Maybe? I’m purely guessing here.)

Oh, and the flow meter is actually totally field-serviceable. I didn’t even think to try this until I got the replacement in the mail, but the top and bottom just twist apart, revealing its one moving piece – a water wheel with magnets, forming the element of a Hall-effect sensor.

I think mine just got a little debris in the spindle and stopped freely spinning. I installed the new one, but I kept the original as a spare – you never know, right?

So now I have easy coffee again. Just thought I’d share, since nowhere I looked (including iFixit, Reddit, even a gray-market copy of the internal Nespresso service manual) talked about the flowmeter or this failure condition – and this is exactly the kind of little around-the-house fix-it thing that I love to do and I wanted to send the joy of it out to you all.

How to get a job in Product Management

Wherever product managers gather, by far the most common question I get is “how do I become a product manager?” No surprise there – product management is a highly visible, intensely exciting, and enormously creative job – but it’s not the kind of job you can land straight out of school, through a coding camp, or via an executive MBA program.

Still, people find their way to product management from a diverse set of backgrounds, and as a veteran of the industry who has hired many, many PMs, I’d like to demystify the path to product.

So, straight from a senior leader in product: here’s how to get a job as a product manager.

1. Master Your Current Role

No one starts out as a product manager. It’s a role that comes after you’ve developed expertise in another area of product delivery. Whether you’re in business strategy, marketing, support, customer success, development, or testing, your current domain will form the first pillar of competency upon which your product management career will be built. The key is to master what you’re doing now. This not only builds your visibility organizationally but also provides you with a core of experiences you can lean on as you engage with other functions of the business.

Pro tip: While mastering your current role, it’s also essential to gain as much exposure to customers as possible. Product management is a customer-centric role, and the more you understand your customers’ needs, pain points, and behavior, the better equipped you’ll be to make decisions that will drive product success. Seek opportunities to interact with customers directly, whether through support calls, user interviews, or market research. This firsthand experience – and the customer anecdotes! – will be invaluable as you make the case for your move into product management.

2. Understand your Market

One of the critical shifts in moving to product management is transitioning from understanding individual customers to understanding the broader market.

Many successful product managers got started by going deep on specific customer problems, capturing the critical nuance that a surface overview would miss. (This is why many product managers have a sales engineering background—they’re professionally competent at understanding and articulating customer needs.)

However, to be an effective product manager, you need to go beyond individual customer problems and think about the market as a whole. What are the common pain points across different customer segments? What gaps exist in the market that your product can fill? Understanding the market means seeing the bigger picture, anticipating the needs of potential customers, and articulating that market understanding in a clear and consistent manner.

Product managers aren’t the voice of the customer; they are the voice of the market. You’ll be advocating for the needs of communities of customers and ensuring that the product serves the broader market effectively. This requires getting away from over-reliance on your knowledge of a specific customer, and instead developing a broad-based understanding that is backed up by data and market analysis.

Start talking about the parts of your market you can reach today, the ones you can reach tomorrow with some new capabilities, and your estimates of the size of the populations you aim to address – this will show that you’re working with a growth mindset.

3. Focus on the Future, Not Just the Present

It’s easy to point out what’s not working in a product—missing features, bugs, usability issues—but that’s not where the true value of a product manager lies. The real challenge is identifying the right next steps for product development. What should the team build next, and why?

As a product manager, your job will be to prioritize the most critical features that will drive the product forward, and to say no to all the tempting features that aren’t strategically relevant.

This involves understanding the product’s long-term vision and aligning it with current market needs. It’s about making tough decisions, often with incomplete information, and justifying those decisions with clear reasoning and data. Being able to articulate why one particular feature should be built next over all the others is a key skill that separates great product managers from the rest, and demonstrating that skill will put you on the product manager shortlist.

4. Use Data to Back Up Your Decisions

Storytelling is a powerful tool in product management, but it’s even more compelling when backed by data. While anecdotes and personal experiences can help illustrate a point, quantitative data provides the evidence needed to make a convincing case. Whether you’re estimating the potential market size for a new feature or analyzing user behavior, data is your ally.

However, you will rarely be able to get all the data you want, or as much precision as you’d like. Realistically, estimates and extrapolations are usually sufficient to guide decision-making, as long as you’re transparent about the assumptions and guesswork involved. The goal is to use data to support your ideas and show that your decisions are grounded in reality, not just intuition.

Demonstrate that you bring the data to the discussion, that you’re transparent about what you know and what you’re extrapolating, and you’ll quickly garner the trust of those around you.

5. Socialize Your Ideas and Seek Feedback

Product management is not a solitary role. It requires collaboration and partnership with multiple stakeholders across the business. One of the best ways to ensure your ideas gain traction is to socialize them early and often. Share your thoughts with colleagues, seek feedback, and listen to different perspectives. This not only helps refine your ideas but also builds support across the organization.

Getting feedback is particularly important because it helps you see potential blind spots and improves the quality of your decision-making. Moreover, when you have the backing of other teams, it’s easier to push your ideas through and get the necessary resources to bring them to life.

Work your internal network, expand it where possible, and when it comes time to make an internal transfer into the PM organization, your name is likely to come up from multiple corners.

6. Be Bold in Advocating for Your Ideas

Product management is not for the timid. If you have a vision or a strong belief in a particular direction for the product, you need to make your case and be willing to stand by it. This doesn’t mean being inflexible, but rather being confident in your ideas and advocating for them assertively.

Being bold also means taking calculated risks. Product management involves making decisions with imperfect information, and sometimes you’ll need to take a leap of faith. The key is to have a well-thought-out rationale for your decisions and to be prepared to defend them.

A reputation for ambitious moves will definitely get you noticed, if those moves are well-founded.

7. Know When to Let Go

Not every idea will gain traction, and as a product manager, you need to know when to let an idea go. It can be frustrating to see a concept you believe in not getting the support it needs, but persistence isn’t always the best approach. Executives and leaders are often aware of your ideas, even if they don’t immediately act on them.

If you’ve made your case and it’s clear that your idea isn’t going to move forward, it’s better to let it go and focus on your next concept. Patience is a critical trait in product management, and sometimes the best course of action is to wait for the right opportunity rather than pushing too hard.

Demonstrate your ability to work professionally, to pick your battles, and to change your position based on new information, and you’ll be modeling the ideal product manager mindset for those around you.

8. Be Mostly Right

Finally, one of the most challenging aspects of product management is the need to be right most of the time. There’s a lot of guesswork involved, and every decision carries significant consequences. While it’s impossible to be right 100% of the time, great product managers have a knack for making the right calls more often than not.

This ability often comes from experience, intuition, and a deep understanding of both the market and the product. It’s about making informed decisions, learning from mistakes, and continuously improving your judgment.

However, it’s crucial not to confuse the need to be right with the need to be seen as right. Product management is about making the best decisions for the product and the company, not about ego or personal validation. The focus should always be on achieving the best outcomes, even if it means admitting when you’re wrong.

To sum this all up: becoming a product manager is a journey that involves mastering your current role, understanding the market, and demonstrating leadership potential for product development.

Landing a job in product means showing you can make data-driven decisions, socialize your ideas, be bold in your vision, and know when to let go. If you take these eight steps to heart, you will position yourself as a strong candidate for a product management role, and you’ll be on the fast-track for the next step in your career!

An honest product manager is a ruthless one

Have you worked with someone who always stays late because “there’s just too much to do!” and they can’t seem to cram it all into the workday? For most people, it’s not hustle culture, it’s poor prioritization skills that leads to the never-ending in-pile.

Great product managers never suffer from this problem – not because their workload is more manageable, but because they know the pile is never-ending, and thus have developed ruthlessly efficient prioritization skills.

Let’s acknowledge the truth of feature development – it’s not all going to get done, not ever (and it doesn’t need to!) Once that reality sinks in, we can start having real conversations about what’s most important to do next, and what can go into the ‘nope’ pile.

It’s important to have a ‘nope’ pile, by the way – backlogs with a ‘future’ category full of half-justified features help no one, and erode the trust in the honesty of product managers. Either put it on the roadmap, or cut it – that’s the core of ruthless prioritization.

Ruthless prioritization is a crucial skill for product managers, helping them handle the complexities of product development and ensuring that the most important tasks get done efficiently. With limited time and resources, being able to figure out what needs immediate attention versus what can wait is essential. This skill isn’t just about making tough choices; it’s about making the right choices that align with the product and company’s overall goals and vision.

First off, ruthless prioritization helps manage limited resources effectively. In any product development cycle, resources like time, money, and people are finite. A product manager who prioritizes well can allocate these resources to tasks that offer the highest return on investment. This means focusing on features or improvements that will have the biggest impact on the product’s success, whether that’s enhancing user satisfaction, increasing market share, or driving revenue growth. By prioritizing efficiently, a product manager ensures that the team isn’t spread too thin across too many projects, which can dilute their impact and lead to burnout.

Second, ruthless prioritization helps maintain strategic focus. At the pace of modern product development, it’s easy to get distracted by the latest hype cycle or the loudest customer requests. However, not all ideas and demands fit with the product’s strategic goals. A product manager must evaluate each request and idea against the company’s long-term vision and objectives. This requires a clear understanding of what the product aims to achieve and the discipline to say no to initiatives that don’t support this vision. By doing so, the product manager keeps the team focused on the core objectives, ensuring their efforts are driving the product in the right direction.

Additionally, ruthless prioritization leads to better decision-making and accountability. In a role where numerous decisions need to be made daily, having a solid prioritization framework can streamline the decision-making process. It allows the product manager to make informed decisions quickly, based on a clear set of criteria that consider impact, feasibility, and alignment with strategic goals. This not only speeds up the process but also provides a clear rationale for why certain tasks are prioritized over others. This transparency is crucial for maintaining team morale and trust, as it ensures everyone understands the reasoning behind decisions and feels confident that their efforts are contributing to the most important goals.

And let’s not forget, prioritization is essential for delivering value to customers. In a competitive market, the ability to quickly respond to customer needs and deliver valuable features can be a significant differentiator. By ruthlessly prioritizing tasks that enhance the user experience and address key pain points, a product manager can ensure that the product remains relevant and competitive. This customer-centric approach not only drives customer satisfaction and loyalty but also positions the product as a leader in the market. And while a specific customer may not thank you for deferring their latest feature request, they’ll stick with you if your product decisions deliver value.

Lastly, ruthless prioritization is key in managing stakeholder expectations. Product managers often juggle the demands and expectations of various stakeholders, including executives, customers, and team members. By clearly communicating the priorities and the rationale behind them, a product manager can manage these expectations effectively, ensuring that stakeholders understand why certain tasks are prioritized and others are deferred. This helps build trust and fosters a collaborative environment where everyone is aligned toward the common goals.

So, as a product manager, don’t let the grindset push you into poor prioritization. Practice your decision-making skills continuously, and you’ll be amazed at how it enables effective resource management, maintains strategic focus, facilitates better decision-making, ensures value delivery to customers, and manages stakeholder expectations.

In an ever-evolving and competitive landscape, the ability to prioritize ruthlessly sets successful product managers apart. It’s a skill that not only drives the success of the product but also defines the outcomes for your company.

Don’t let these 5 Myths about Product Management mislead your team!

Myth 1: Product Management Always Sits at the Intersection of Engineering, Design, and Business

Sure, this is the ideal scenario, but it’s more of a goal than a reality for most of us. Often, product management reports to engineering, turning the role into a mix of technical project management and program management. In other cases, it falls under marketing, making product managers technical champions of the go-to-market strategy, heavily involved in positioning and messaging.

While there are strong product leaders with the title of Chief Product Officer (CPO) who truly operate at this intersection, the trend of having dual-role executives like CMO/CPO or CTO/CPO means many product managers are still in subordinate roles.

Myth 2: Product Managers Have Ultimate Authority Over Their Products

In truth, product management is all about influence, not authority. That’s why it’s often a second career for many. Even in a perfect setup, product managers create a vision based on evidence and analysis, then work to get other teams on board. They don’t build the vision through direct power but by convincing others to support and contribute to it.

In most organizations, engineering, marketing, and sales don’t report to product management. This separation is beneficial because it ensures ideas are either reinforced by or challenged by discrete business goals. Product managers are accountable for their product’s success but don’t own the resources needed to deliver it. They lead by influence, not by control.

Myth 3: Product Manager, Project Manager, and Program Manager Are Synonyms

This is a common misconception, often because product managers end up doing a bit of everything. However, these roles are distinct in both name and function.

Project Managers are the organizers, coordinating activities, and ensuring teams are communicating and collaborating effectively. They’re the point person for a project but not the ultimate decision-maker or owner of the effort.
Program Managers handle cross-team projects, managing schedules and dependencies. They’re accountable for accurate reporting and status updates, navigating the landscape through frameworks like DACI/RACI, but they don’t weigh in on market fit or own business outcomes.
Product Managers are the voice of the market, responsible for understanding customer needs and defining competitive solutions. They might coordinate between teams and track schedules, but their main focus is on the success of the product, not just the timeline.

Myth 4: Product Management Is a Technical Role

Some think product managers need to be tech wizards, deeply involved in system design and database structures, or even capable of stepping in for engineering managers. This isn’t the case. While many product managers have technical backgrounds, others come from UX, liberal arts, or other fields. Understanding technology is crucial, but the nitty-gritty details should be left to the experts.

Product managers should be involved in strategic decisions about the product, blending insights from various teams. Their role is more about being at the intersection of all these domains rather than being purely technical.

Myth 5: Product Managers Only Collect Customer Requirements, and Customers Are Experts on the Products They Use

Customers know their pain points best, but they’re not always the best source for solutions. If you ask a customer how to improve a horse-drawn buggy, they might suggest a robotic horse, not imagine an automobile.

Product managers gather customer pain points and synthesize them into actionable requirements. While it might sometimes look like we’re just passing customer requests to engineering, our job is to dig deeper and find solutions that customers haven’t thought of yet. It’s about understanding the problem space and crafting innovative solutions, not just implementing customer suggestions.

Reality-Based Product Management

Product Management theory from an established software development industry leader

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