The Framework That Product Managers Can Use to Almost See Into the Future
Originally published on www.Ben-Staples.com
As Product Managers, our job is to maximize the value of the engineering team. We do this by coming up with ideas that have as high of a probability for success as possible.
How do Product Managers do that successfully? We leverage direct customer feedback and any data we have on hand.
Customer feedback can come in many forms. Customers can on one hand, call in screaming to your customer service representatives about a terrible experience they’ve had. Alternatively, customers can send you flowers and a valentine because of how incredible their shopping journey was.
Beyond those two ends of the spectrum, it can sometimes be incredibly difficult to get a clear signal of how customers will react to a new feature before it’s actually built. The more you as a Product Manager can “see into the future” and predict how customers will respond to a feature, the more valuable you’ll be as a Product Manager.
For example if you could always, with 100% certainty know how customers would respond to a feature, you wouldn’t just leave your backlog as is. Instead, you’d prioritize things totally differently; changing the sequence of some things, adding other items that were missed, and…
