ProdMinds #18 - Diana Stepner
Customers found it too hard to use and simply stopped coming back despite training and appreciating the problem the product was supposed to solve.
Customers found it too hard to use and simply stopped coming back despite training and appreciating the problem the product was supposed to solve.
In all seriousness, it’s a great job but it’s often hard to feel you’re making an impact. I was a really strong individual contributor earlier in my career, and it took me a long time to let go of the fact that I wasn’t being measured on output anymore.
I believe the product-led growth strategy helps companies to taste the real-market much faster than traditional sales-led growth models. You can run agile experiments and learn the market dynamics more effectively. Also, fundamentally, buyer behavior is changing as well.
Product managers usually tend to satisfy power users’ needs because these users are more vocal and send emails to customer support more often.
I believe if you’ve understood the problem well, then building the right product is just one step away. And understanding the problem well is only possible by closely listening to the customers.
In my definition, a product-led company is a company where everyone believes they support the product directly. This includes teams like Finance or People Ops, which are typically considered “far away” from product development.
Communication skills are a given with almost any role, but it is the ability to listen - really listen, to what is being said by users, customers, sales teams, about what they want from a product.
Managing internal stakeholders begins with prioritization (like so many topics in product management). Since PMs have an essentially unmanageable number of stakeholders, it’s critical to know at any given time which ones can make the biggest contribution to the success of a product.
Successful products attract rapid growth in usage and it can be a huge challenge to keep up with performance, availability, and security demands.
A key to master the art of being compelling as a PM is to focus on both the “substance” of your argument and the “style” of the argument, particularly as it relates to the target audience and key stakeholders we are trying to convince.
Instead of “work fast and break stuff” you should work fast and learn quickly. What this means is that you have to understand problems you think you will be able to solve
Product Management for me has been a journey through various start-ups, I started in a clinical setting, pivoted into marketing
I’m a Portuguese entrepreneur and a global citizen, currently based in the south of Portugal. I’m the type of person that enjoys moving fast, launching when 75% done and making adjustments on the fly.
When I started building software, I didn’t know that there were multiple roles in teams. It might sound funny now, but I was under the impression that everybody just combined everything.
I think no one is born a Product Manager, simply because there is no single study course to become one. And I was no exception.