PM Tips for Managing New Products

When I was only about 4 months in Product Management, I connected with a guy at a product meetup. Intelligent guy. Not too long after that day, he mentioned a project he wanted to work on and asked me to come on as an assistant PM.

I was super excited because I’d never worked with a senior PM before (check the intro for some context) and I was struggling with a lot of imposter syndrome. I wanted to learn from someone with a lot more experience. So, I said yes.

For the project, we worked on a brand-new product idea. He put together a document that contained all the insights about the market and the competition he could find (actually nicely done, I was impressed). Then, he put together a business model canvas (BMC) highlighting aspects like the value proposition, competitors, available resources, pricing, etc.

And… that was it.

The next step was delving into designs, writing super high-level requirements and passing stuff to engineering. I was baffled. But, yea the major reason I was baffled at the time was that we didn’t do customer interviews. I expected we’d do this because it was pretty much stressed in the 3-month training I’d done when I started my PM career. And I was certain those people did not teach me nonsense. But yea, even in the 3-month training, nobody taught me about a business model canvas either.

Sure, I’m not the only one who’s gone through this. I hear countless stories of people who work with more experienced PMs and are often surprised to find some steps or processes they deem as important skipped. Or, find an entirely different process being used.

I’ve always been curious. So, over the years, I’ve gone on an endless path to seek knowledge as much as I can. It was in this process I discovered something crucial that a lot of PMs miss. Even experienced PMs. All product work is not created equal.

The techniques you use when managing a product that’s pre-PMF should not exactly be the same as the techniques you’ll use at the growth phase post-PMF or the technique you’d use when doing feature work for a post-PMF product.

I’ll begin by explaining what product-market fit (PMF) is. It’s a situation where a product is able to satisfy the needs of a market leading to consistent demand and use.

The case with the more experienced PM in my example above was most likely that he’d seen the process he was using work for a post-PMF product that he simply adopted it for a pre-PMF product even going ahead to delete some crucial aspects like user interviews because he felt he could save some time.

I’m going to run through 10 lessons I’ve learned about managing Pre-PMF products.

Lesson 1

Everything you know is an assumption

One of the things I discovered is sometimes your best and brightest idea can fail when it gets to market.

It’s important to fail early enough if that’s going to happen. Fail at the point where you have the least amount of resources invested.

To achieve this, you must be humble enough to question your ideas. Detail everything out and take a scientific approach by seeing everything as an assumption until proven otherwise.

Lesson 2

Your strategy can make or break your product

Have a good strategy. You need to spend quality time here. Many people spend only a couple of minutes putting together a business model canvas. That is too little effort, especially for a product that hasn’t been battle-tested by the market.

Spend quality time covering important aspects of your strategy like clearly defining the problem you want to solve, the existing gaps in the market, your primary value proposition as well as the sub-benefits your product provides, your competitive advantage (short-term and long-term), your growth strategy (channels, goals, timelines, etc), your business model (pricing, cost etc), amongst others.

Lesson 3

Test everything

Invest time into validating each aspect of the assumption you’ve made in your product strategy. Because your strategy is still an assumption. Some techniques include customer interviews, market research, analyzing existing competitors, talking to experts in that field and other low-cost ways like creating a landing page and promoting it to generate a waitlist or conducting a fake door test.

For example, your goal with customer interviews at this stage would be to identify the problems and the target customer’s natural/likely solution inclination so you can finetune your strategy to align accordingly.

Lesson 4

Identify your biggest risks

As you validate, it’s crucial to be intentional about identifying the aspects of your strategy that are likely to lead to a product failure.

These are your high-risk assumptions.

It could be your value proposition or your pricing strategy. These are the aspects you want to spend more time testing and verifying. For instance, when you build an MVP, your goal is to highlight the parts of your strategy with the highest risk so you can test them with the MVP. For example, suppose you discover while testing that your pricing is the aspect of your strategy that’s most likely to lead to failure. In that case, you may want to be deliberate about testing that with your MVP to ensure that it’s iterated and validated enough to not be a risk factor moving forward.

Lesson 5

You need to be intentional about growth too

One of the biggest mistakes I made in my early days as a PM was not thinking about how people would find my product and how I’d grow user engagement for my product. I left this to the marketing team.

Here’s why this is nottttt a wise thing to do. As PM, the growth of the product is your responsibility and you’d be leaving a ton of leverage on the table by not thinking of how to grow your product from the onset. There’s no point in building a product that no one knows exists or that doesn’t have a sustainable way to grow. The least you should do is work closely with the marketing or/and growth team. But you need to be an active participant because you can’t achieve PMF without growth.

Lesson 6

Know the most important metrics to track

Remember that your product is still pre-PMF. So, you need to track the key metrics for PMF which are adoption and retention. Adoption simply points to the number of people that are signing up to use your product while retention points to the number of people that keep coming back to use your product. Retention is further broken down into activation and engagement. Activation is the point when the user carries out the primary action within your product where they get value. You should define what that is for your product. For Whatsapp, it could be sending the first message. For Uber, it could be when the customer orders their first ride. Engagement, on the other hand, refers to how often the user interacts with your product. For engagement, you need to understand something called a “frequency spectrum” which is a fancy word that describes how often the average user is likely to engage with your product. For Whatsapp that would be daily. So, if an active user does not engage with the product in a week, you can already tell that there’s a problem. For Uber, that’ll be weekly. For your product, that’ll be??? Define that! And stop tracking only the high-level retention metric. See activation and engagement as the input metrics that feed into retention. So, if something goes wrong with activation, you’re able to identify it early enough before it starts affecting your retention.

We say a product has achieved PMF when it sustainably has new users adopting the product and retaining a good number of existing users.

Another important lesson I learnt from this is that the type of customers you acquire affects your activation and engagement. If you do a lot of giveaways simply to acquire low-quality users, that’s ineffective too. You need to think of how your acquisition channels affect the quality of customers you get and how that impacts activation and engagement.

Lesson 7

PMF can be lost

This was one of the hardest lessons I learnt.

It’s easy to get comfortable when you start seeing a consistent influx of customers and decent retention. It’s easy to assume you can’t lose PMF. But at any point where new user adoption stalls and retention dwindles you’ve lost PMF. So, always stay on your toes and remember to track the critical metrics.

Lesson 8

Write Clear Documentations

Proper documentation is essential at any phase of product development. Writing clearly will always be valuable.

Writing clear requirements for one improves stakeholder alignment tremendously. So, ensure to document everything from your strategy to your requirements to everything else in a structured manner. Your product will keep reaping the rewards down the road.

Lesson 9

Become one with your Customers

If your target customers are sleeping and waking up somewhere, you need to be sleeping and waking up there. Of course, that’s an exaggeration… yea? Yea?? (Not really!)

I like to use the analogy of my sister and me. We’re so close, we literally grew up together. One time, someone tried to send me something but they couldn’t reach me so they called my sister to ask her what I’d like and she told them. They delivered it and I absolutely liked it. My sister had spent so much time with me (not always intentionally) that she just knew what I’d like.

You need to do the same with your customers and your domain. If your target customers are in certain Telegram channels, you need to be there. If they follow certain types of people online, you’d better be following those people. If they attend certain types of events in person, go there. Just do as much as you can.

Create systems that ensure you’re always in tune with what your target customers are saying and what they’re being influenced by.

I’ve personally spent countless hours in crypto clubhouse & Twitter spaces just listening and observing. Following certain social media accounts and joining certain Telegram channels.

This is one of the biggest hacks for improving your product sense too!

Lesson 10

Keep Validating

After you launch your MVP, ensure you keep validating. Some people call this continuous discovery. Test via a couple of techniques. Get feedback from customers and keep finetuning aspects of your strategy.

Your goal should be to fine-tune until you get things right.

If you keep all of these lessons in mind, you’ll increase your chances of achieving PMF.

In the next post, I’ll be talking about one of the key aspects of product strategy — competitive advantage. I’ll explain some of the things many people overlook when they define this and how you can use this to your advantage.