My friend and colleague Garrett Dimon wrote about his experiences building and selling a product in his post Hindsight. He gives some advice based on what he learned. You might not agree with everything, but I think his perspective is really interesting and worth checking out. For example, on the balance between building product and doing marketing:

I don’t want to build an operational system to grow a business and then spend no time on the product. I want to design a company to build the product and serve customers. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be some type of marketing that will need to be done, but I’d rather find ways where marketing is a by-product of the software rather than a separate activity. Checking analytics and numbers eventually becomes relevant for a business, but it’s a spectrum. I want to check the numbers to make sure the business is healthy, but I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m spending days analyzing or optimizing.

I think most of us know by now that merely copying competitors’ features or business models is a bad idea. Jesse Weaver’s Emulation Is Not a Product Strategy does a very good job of explaining why this approach almost never works, and what to focus on instead. One example:

In focusing their efforts on emulation, product managers stop considering options that could enhance what is unique about the company and its customer base. They miss chances to deliver something powerful and unexpected. Instead, product managers should focus on unique strengths — those things their customers came for in the first place. In doubling down on those, product managers can exponentially increase a product’s value, deepening customers’ connection to the specific magic that makes a product special.

Product Management podcasts are a bit hit and miss, but this week there were two discussions that I found really interesting and useful.

First, on the Product Science Podcast, an interview with Teresa Torres on continuous product discovery:

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach and the author of the Product Talk Blog. She spends most of her time coaching cross-functional product teams on how to adopt continuous discovery practices. On this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we get into how you can refine your product discovery practices.

And on the Product Experience Podcast, Tim Herbig discusses how to be an effective product leader when you don’t have “official” power:

Tim Herbig has made many mistakes (who hasn’t?). Fortunately for us, Tim not only owns up to his mistakes, he’s written a book to help the rest of us avoid making the same ones. We’ve all had issues with how to work best – not only within our individual teams, but with the rest of the organisation as well. In our conversation, he shares some simple and practical methods to diagnose when you have a problem and how to solve it.

Tim references Teresa’s work in his conversation, so the two episodes are really complementary as well, which is a nice bonus. Tim’s agile peer canvas to foster empathy within a team is also really interesting and worth looking into.

This interview with former Google and Flipkart product leader Punit Soni covers a lot of ground and is interesting all the way through. His thoughts on the importance of a go-to-market strategy is so important, and a trap many product managers fall into:

When an idea is finally in sight, it may be tempting to jump feet first into product building. According to Soni, founders need to resist the impulse to obsess over product to the exclusion of everything else at the very beginning. “It’s tempting to slip into a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, especially if you’re convinced of your own product prowess. Now I’m a product manager through and through, but I’ll be the first to tell you that product usually isn’t the issue,” he says.

Instead, tackle go-to-market, working through who’s going to buy, why and what they would pay. “Product is more binary in that, either the tech will allow you to do it or it’s not possible. Making sure that you can build a sustainable business model around that product is a far tougher task,” Soni says. “Figure all of that out before you start a company, not as you go along. Once you check that box, then you can become a product-focused company.”

I really like Vrushali Paunikar’s approach to onboarding new product managers in an organization. In particular, the focus on three different time horizons with distinct goals is very important:

The first 30 days are about breadth. Put together a 30-day checklist broken up by people, product, and process to help your PM gain context and develop peace-time relationships.

The first 3 months are about perfecting execution. Give your PM projects she can actually launch within the 3-month window to help her establish early wins as well as learn your product development process.

At the end of the first 6 months, your PM should have a point of view on the direction of her product. Set this expectation early and empower her to own product strategy and vision.

One crucial point that is implied but not explicitly stated in Vrushali’s post is that PMs should avoid coming in with guns blazing in the first month and try to change/introduce a bunch of stuff. The first month is about really, truly, honestly listening and understanding. You’ll have plenty of time to have an opinion. Make sure you understand the context of the company and the product before you start having and communicating them.

For further reading on this, a while back I also wrote about What a Product Manager should focus on in the first 90 days.

In Egoless Innovation Sari Harrison reminds us that ideas are not personal. As product managers our goal should always be to get the best outcome, not to win or be right or for everyone to “just get along”:

When the idea you are advocating for gets challenged, an egoless innovation mindset means choosing to see the challenge as a gift to the innovative outcome which the idea hopes to someday become. It means looking objectively at the input, responding to it authentically, saying “wow, good point, I’m going to take that back to the team” if it was a point you hadn’t considered and saying “yes, we thought of that and…” if you have. It means you don’t get flustered by questions or negative comments because you are focused on achieving the best outcomes, not your own status. If you can embody this, you will be helping move the culture towards more and more innovation occurring with less and less friction. And you will be more successful.

Herb Caudill’s Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories is an extensive analysis of the rewrite projects of companies like Basecamp and Trello, why they succeeded or failed, and what we can learn from them:

Once you’ve learned enough that there’s a certain distance between the current version of your product and the best version of that product you can imagine, then the right approach is not to replace your software with a new version, but to build something new next to it — without throwing away what you have.

Eventually all product managers face a decision like this, so I found these case studies invaluable.

I agree with Chris LoSacco that “Why Not?” is a dangerous questions to ask for any product team:

Often stakeholders assume that if their ideas aren’t bad, they should be on the roadmap. “This isn’t hard; let’s get it in front of the engineers.” But the burden of proof is the other way around — ideas should get turned down unless they clear a high hurdle.

Just because a feature is easy or obvious doesn’t mean you should build it. This is why I prefer the question “Why Now?”:

What is the danger of not doing this project right now? If we don’t solve this problem or add this feature right now, what do we lose? Are sign-ups going to drop? Are we going to lose customers? Are we going to miss a major shift in the market? If so, then, yes, now is a good time to work on it. But if the room suddenly falls silent and everyone comes up short on the downside of skipping over the idea, that’s a pretty good indication that it can wait for later.