“Product Person”
A couple years ago, Semil wrote a piece on how he thinks about who qualifies as a “product person”.
In that piece, Semil writes —
They could use the product for a week and then fire off a huge email listing all the things they’d like to improve, remove, or add. This attention to detail cannot be bought.
I think this is probably the best way of looking at what a product person means. It is not necessarily tied to a role or a big tech company. Having some peculiar traits makes one a product person.
While I don’t think I qualify as a great product person yet, I think I am making small steps in that direction. I don’t think spending some time daily on Product Hunt can make one a product person. Scrolling through a feed with lots of new products is much different than really using them, understanding the decisions that made the product the way it is, and being thoughtful enough to understand what does and doesn't work based off of human behaviors. Observing people use a product is as important as understanding the technicalities behind it. And, as Semil pointed out, one need not be a product manager at a big company or an investor to be a product person. In fact, I think being a product person should be considered a prerequisite for becoming a good product manager or an investor.
I think being curious is the key. And, curiosity cannot be faked. I think curiosity manifests itself in the form of the quality of questions we ask. When I joined betaworks for this summer, the first thing I did was to set up meetings with designers and engineers at various studio companies. I bothered them by asking a lot of questions about the products they were building. That exercise is really paying off now that I am dealing with six product teams. While all of these teams are building conversational products, most of them are working in an industry I had little to no prior knowledge of. The lack of domain knowledge has gotten me to ask questions like a five year old. And, contrary to what I thought, this incessant questioning has gotten most teams to develop good relationships with me. My questions challenges their assumptions and product decisions. A lot of times, we stumble upon unexplored areas as a result of my questions. It’s been really interesting dealing with such wide range of products and working with them on user segmentation, metrics, features, workflows, growth tactics, marketing, partnerships, etc. Everything ultimately ties back to the product.
There are so many products that I like using and have opinions on whats working, whats no working, what would make it better and how something should work. Here are some examples of things I think some of the popular products might want to explore —
What if theSkimm enables users to select packages of events to subscribe to for Skimm Ahead ?
What if Reserve considers building a feature wherein the app recommends its users nearby dessert places at the time they pay their bill or recommends combinations of food+dessert places before they book a table.
What if Medium enables us to put emojis or expressions along with highlights on the text?
What if we have “peak and pop” for Linkedin profiles within Twitter’s app?
What if there is an integration between great native content on social networks and Foursquare’s data?
I think we can have product people in industries other than tech as well. There are product people in media and journalism. There could be product people in real estate and consulting as well. A of it is just about being very thoughtful about how your clients interact with you in the broadest sense of the definition.
