The Hardest Thing in Product Management

Its not your product, its distribution

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When Product Managers are asked what some of their most risky assumptions are, they often cite market risk assumptions or technology risk assumptions. This is what the vast majority of PMs spend time thinking about and validating.

• Market Risk — the assumption that there is meaningful demand for the product you are building
• Technology Risk — that the core value proposition (that eliminates the market risk) can indeed be built in reality.

The thing that Product Managers and builders often don’t take into account is Distribution risk assumptions, which is, — can a product successfully be distributed/delivered to customers at scale?

I learnt this lesson the hard way. A few years ago, we built a Smart HVAC diagnostics product that was technologically groundbreaking, and our early customers loved it — but after 3 years of repeated product and business model iterations we couldn’t hit the scale we’d had hoped for. It was a great product, but we’d tremendously underestimated the challenges in…