The art of product management

Every business depends on customers. And what customers choose to buy is either our product or competitors’.

The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build.

Nowadays, we can easily build a wrong product faster than ever. Hence, how do build a product customers want? How do we prove that we are right?

I discussed it with many product managers in Singapore and here are 5 key success factors I found:

1. Fall in love with a problem, not a specific solution. It’s not about deliverable. Go to find a real, important and large problem that influences millions of people. Wrong solutions can be fixed, but non-existent problems aren’t adjustable at all. Building features is easy, building the right features for the right people is challenging.
2. Build a product vision from the root cause! Users know the problems best and we may know the potential solutions best. However, we need to ensure designers, developers and users are all part of the decision-making process to validate and shape better solutions.
3. We need to keep optimizing our product until it is good enough for users to recommend our product to others, then, again, continually focus on customer retention and product optimization.
4. Good product managers know how to build social capital and leverage the entire organization, meaning they know how to use their own knowledge and cooperate with engineers, designers, customers, the sales team, press, and financial analysts
5. Good product managers empower and motivate teams to do the best work and make them feel real ownership for a product and responsible for the business outcome

In short, throughout history, products are just like biological species. If the species know how to adapt to the changing environment, they survive and become better. If they don’t know how to adapt, they became extinct. PM has to keep adapting because there are rare products that can be competitive forever! Therefore, we need to continually discover and deliver innovative products to sustain our business. Disrupt, or be disrupted! We should always ask ourselves: how do we make our team and partners constantly add value to clients via key channels in return for increasing cash flow? (even if market change, customers change, expectation change, regulation change, and technology change)