Why Your Product Will Fail Without These 3 Product Management Essentials

Product management is a multifaceted role that demands a diverse skill set and strategic insight. This article is designed for Product Managers and anyone involved in product discovery, strategy definition, backlog prioritization, market analysis, and user research. Whether you’re shaping a product’s vision or diving into customer needs, you’ll find valuable insights here to support your journey.

1. Focus on the problem, not the solution

When organisations value product expertise more than the ability to understand the market and the customer needs, product people start putting more effort into the solution than the problem. We sometimes design, build and even deliver solutions without validating the problem it solves. We take our understanding of the problem as a universal truth and run with it. We need to stop, look back and ask ourselves, “What is the problem we are solving? Why are we solving it? Are we solving the right problem?”. The output of product management should be a prioritized list of problems to be solved and hypotheses to be validated, not a list of features to be implemented.

A problem well stated is half solved — Charles Kettering

Organisations have hired many creative people to solve problems and development teams are made with them. They are more than capable of solving problems and running experiments to validate hypotheses. These experiments can be run in collaboration with product management, and input from product management will be needed in the solution design but product management should not run the show in design and development.

Here’s a tool that can help us in doing this in a structured way: Lean Product and Strategy Canvas

2. Do not fall in love with your vision

Another big mistake we make in product management is that we get emotionally attached to our vision and ideas. Let’s say we have this big idea that we think would revolutionise a domain or an industry. We all are human beings and we have our biases. We look for evidence that supports our idea and turn a blind eye to the evidence that disproves it. Whenever our idea is challenged, we become defensive. This recipe is designed to deliver the wrong product.

What if we can consider our ideas as assumptions and consider our beliefs as hypotheses? We believe this idea would solve the problem for a target customer group! This way, we will be driven to validate our hypothesis rather than running ahead with our precious million-dollar idea that is not validated. Instead of using terms such as “customer value”, we should use terms like “perceived customer value” because the value is a perception until it is validated.

Fail early, fail often, but always fail forward — John C. Maxwell

No matter how much we believe in our vision, if the unbiased evidence shows that it is not the way forward, we should be open to pivoting or completely rethinking the roadmap. Otherwise, we would invest heavily in an initiative that will fail at the hands of the customers. Let it fail very early so we can learn fast, adapt and avoid costly mistakes. This is why investors and sponsors should always ask for evidence and data to validate the idea before investing heavily in it.

Here’s a tool that you can use to prioritize the hypotheses and decide what to do with them: The Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas

3. Execution matters more than the idea

Most believe that great ideas are what change the world. No, it is the execution of a great idea that changes the world! Good ideas are relatively common, but the skills, dedication, and strategies needed to bring them to life are rare. A great idea without action is just a thought, whereas even an average idea can create a significant impact when executed well.

To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions — Steve Jobs

The product management engages in many conversations with the customers and gains loads of insights that motivate their ideas. If these insights stay locked in their brains and are not exposed to the teams who run the experiments, solve problems and execute the ideas, the teams will be missing out on knowledge and might be blindly developing solutions without understanding why. We must always communicate why we do things to the development teams so they can make autonomous decisions without blindly trusting product management.

Decision-making plays a huge role in the execution of ideas. Great decision-makers always back their decisions with data or are not afraid of making decisions based on gut feeling. Sometimes, it is better to decide even if it may be wrong than get stuck in analysis paralysis. In this case, we should take action to validate the decision quickly so the adverse impact of the bad decisions can be mitigated faster.

Although product management should not run the show in design and development, there are many ways that we can support the execution without dropping the ball. To get the product to the market, a lot of collaboration is required among different departments such as marketing, sales, legal, customer support, etc. We can play a vital role in getting everyone together and aligning on the goal of releasing the product to market.

Let’s not try to be idea machines but focus on being great executors of ideas.

In summary, if we put more effort into defining the problem, do not get emotionally attached to our vision and ideas, and value execution over generating that one great idea, we are in a better position to deliver a great product that solves a real problem and create a positive impact on people’s lives.

I hope this article helped you to think differently. Let’s connect on LinkedIn to explore more and do great things together.