3 Product Management Pitfalls All Founders Should Avoid
Some stuff to avoid. Here’s why.
If you’re new to the term, Product Management is a way of thinking and doing things to promote the success and wellbeing of your product.
Here are 3 common pitfalls I’ve seen founders happily walk into only to realise later that they could have fared better avoiding them.
1. Not knowing who your customers are
Seriously, the first mistake to marketing or building a product is diving straight into things without understanding your users enough. That’s just called walking blindly in the dark. And if you’re thinking whether or not you can afford the time to do customer study, I’m sorry, but you cannot afford not to do this. Any research you can afford is better than no research.
Say if you wanted to buy a meaningful birthday gift for someone, you’ll need to know them well — where they work, the colour they like, their hobbies, etc. It works the same way.
If you want to build a meaningful and useful digital product, spend some time knowing who your customers are, not just their demographics (age, gender, occupation, etc.). Go deeper. Study their needs and behaviours rather than demographics. Define your market and customer to good detail if you want to build a meaningful product for them.
2. Competing on features
I could preach all day on this. Too many of my clients fall into this pitfall, thinking that having ‘cooler’ features or just more features will help them gain an edge over their competition.
WRONG.
I get it. You’re in panic mode, sweating in your pants and you need a quick fix because your competitors are moving at breaking speed. But features aren’t your quick fix. Features aren’t supposed to make you feel more confident about your product either.
Instead of building more features for the sake of it, spend that time making your ‘Y’ super polished. Products aren’t ever perfect, but they can be well-polished.
Fill in the blanks — “My product let’s you do Y well. ‘Y’ is your product’s core user experience, core functionality. It’s a simple one liner of not more than 5 words at best. Here are some examples that may help you come up with yours:
So instead of building features A, B, C, D, E, etc. (friend referrals, comments, reviews, etc.), think about building features that would make your Y super awesome. If a feature doesn’t make your ‘Y’ better, rethink it.
I’ve had stubborn clients who wanted to build an entire Titantic, when all they needed was a good boat to launch beta. It hardly worked out that they needed any of the extras. Building the cruise ship also meant that they compromised on the quality and the potential of building an attractive, gorgeous boat with the time and resources that they had. They’d rather have an empty more, than a meaningful less.
Disruption is in the experience, not the tech. Tech just enables the experience to happen.
So don’t compete on features. Differentiate you product with market positioning, branding, customer service, a good story, any other secret sauce other than features. Because even if you can think of a feature that’s not there yet, it won’t be too long till your competitors catch on anyway.
3. Being a yes-man
It’s funny how people-pleasing happens so often in the world of product management. If there was one thing I’ve learnt the most during my career as a product manager, it is how to say no. Simple, but endearingly difficult in a variety of everyday situations.
Your biz dev guys needs feature A to sell more. Your CEO wants feature B. Your customers want features C, D, E and F. Marketing is convincing you that he direly needs G to move the acquisition needle. Your investors want H.
The backlog only has space for one, max two.
It helps to ask—How much is my request really worth? What other things would I give up to have this thing instead?
I get asked quite a lot on how to say no to investors. There’s no easy way around this. But if you’re the founder, you should know your business better than anyone else, including your investors. Investors are there to support you, not run your business. If you get that right, you can make the right feature calls for your business.
Avoid the pitfall of building what’s not necessary right now, and only used by a handful of people. Everything in software development is nearly possible, but the answer needn’t always be yes. Humans can’t invent or bend additional time, neither can your developers.
Say no.
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