Seven laws for Product Manager
Almost every school of thought have their own rules or laws to follow. Right now, product managers don’t have any “official” rules or laws, but that doesn’t mean we can’t apply existing rules for guidance.
Below are seven laws that I think is applicable to product managers.
1. Newton’s Third Law
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”
If we ignore the calculation part, Newton’s third law application is broad and quite easy to understand. It is quite simple and yet so profound. The implication is clear, whenever you do something it will impact other things.
As product manager, you will have the power to make changes — the backlog priority for example. If we consider this law, it means you must review the effect of changes that you’ve made and make sure that you can handle the impact.
2. Goodhart’s Law
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
This is a powerful law for product manager. As a product manager, we should always try to keep this in mind.
A good example for this is website traffic. Traffic used to be an indicator on how popular your website is, but when it becomes the target — especially a target that you need to achieve you can easily be tempted to buy cheap traffic (which will not do anything to your system besides overload it)
Some people may counter that if you put a good measurement then this will not happen. In this case , you can change traffic into conversion which may be a better measurement.
While this may help, we can’t forget that one measurement can have multiple impacts. You will need to re-define multiple measurements which might lead to more confusion.
PS: Check this link for an interesting case of this law.
3. The Pareto Principle
“For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”
Basically we can translate this to “80% of your income comes from 20% of your customer”. Now here’s the catch, if 20% of your customers have different needs than the 80%, which one should you prioritize?
I’m actually in bind about this law, while I prefer to serve 80% of the customers, there are times that we must focus on the 80% of income. I think the best way is to have two separate teams handling each of them, since they represent two different spectrum that might have contrasting needs.
4. Occam’s razor
“Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In this case the simpler one is usually better.”
5. Gall’s law
“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system”
The fourth and fifth law are linked together. It is clear and to the point. Always start from a simple system then evolve it to a more complex one. Most of the time the simple ones work better for your customer. Just make sure that when you add complexity, it’s because it’s necessary ‘now’ rather than ‘maybe we need it later’.
6. Juhani’s Law
“The compromise will always be more expensive than either of the suggestions it is compromising.”
Compromise is a lose-lose situation since both parties won’t get 100%. Delivering only a part of request from both sides will invalidate the reason on why the request was made in the first place. It is better to prioritize which one you can deliver first then move to the next one.
7. Murphy’s Law
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
No law will be complete without the famous (or infamous) Murphy’s Law. It’s a reminder to us to be prepared for everything in every stage of product development.
This is my list, do you have other laws that you think are applicable in the product life cycle? Feel free to share and comment with us.
