Winning at Product: Four Roles
It’s no secret lots of work goes into launching products. But there is a secret: you need four hats.
We build products to make an impact, we’re in it to win. Getting to Product/Market Fit is the first step, so I covered the four most important variables to get PM Fit. Now we look at the skills you need to get there.
Based on years of designing products for businesses I’ve grouped everything needed to get the job done into four roles. What’s important in each role is not the title, but rather the focus of the role and how you know you’re doing a good job.
1. Product Management
Goal: find a quantifiable opportunity.
Wearing the Product Manager hat in the triangle model starts with uncovering a real opportunity. You might call this a mix of market research, customer development, and requirement gathering. What’s important is that you’ve: 1) identified a market that’s big enough 2) picked an initial customer segment you can reach, and 3) found a pain point those customers can and will jump at the opportunity to solve. Does a Product Manager do other things? Yes. I see their role as a facilitator, constantly pushing the product forward. But in order to know what to push for you need to start with a real problem.
2. Product Design
Goal: design a solution your customer segment quantifiably wants.
With an empathetic understanding of the opportunity at hand and your Product Designer hat firmly affixed you can start formulating solutions. The simplest solution is a promise, which you might call a value proposition, and grows in complexity to encompass UX flows, wireframes, and mockups. Designing a simple yet compelling solution benefits from feedback. Test your solution while it’s still mocks to make sure you’ve designed something that actually solves the problem.
3. Product Development
Goal: build the solution fast.
The solution should have a limited scope because we’re still building a prototype and not gearing up for mass production. Switching to Developer mode, you’re less concerned with maintainability and more concerned with building something that can be further tested as a real solution to a real problem. Almost everyone overbuilds. Keep it simple and optimize for the user experience instead of the code. Push back on Product Design when things can be done in a simpler manner. Focus on speed.
4. Product Marketing
Goal: ramp up generation of qualified leads.
What I didn’t tell you was that you were secretly wearing the Product Marketing hat earlier on. You need to find a way to reach your target customer otherwise it doesn’t matter how good your product is. Hopefully your customers talk to each other but in order to get feedback throughout the process you’ll benefit from having a small stream of qualified leads. Assuming the feedback supports the existence of a real problem and your solution’s viability as it grows in fidelity you can forge ahead and start telling the world. The game now is testing channels and messaging to acquire qualified leads.
If you’re working on a startup you face competing demands everyday. Concentrating on one of these hats at any given time will not only gives you the luxury of focus but will guide you through launching a product that solves a real problem for real people.
Do you build products?
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