365 Days In a Product Manager’s Life: Day #6 — Don’t Fall In Love…With An Idea. 💔💡

Just like a romantic relationship, you have to learn when to let go. In life, learning to let go of things usually saves us a ton of resources, regardless of whether the reasons are emotional, financial, or physical. Our human psychology is programmed to create internal biases that could potentially get in the way of proper decision making. In most cases, this disruption impacts our ability to understand and appreciate the bigger picture and probably end badly (whether in relationships, products, etc.).

In a Product Management context, getting extremely invested in a particular idea, concept, or solution might cause you to miss out on opportunities that are right in front of you and potentially lead to your product’s failure. We usually hear product leaders addressing the above in the following terms: “Don’t fall in love with your product.”

With this being said, It is imperative for PMs to be very flexible, adaptable, and accepting of feedback to look at things holistically. Now, it might be easier said than done because internal biases are usually difficult to detect, and resolving them could be challenging. However, just like everything else in life, practice makes perfect. To address these challenges, I spent a lot of time thinking about all of this today and wanted to share some ways we can overcome them:

1. Fall in love with your customer: The main goal behind every PM’s role is to discover how to build solutions that fulfill their customer’s needs and alleviate their pains. To accomplish this goal, we as PMs have to really dig deep into our users and better understand their personas and emotional impulses. The most direct way to do this is simple, LISTEN. Actively listening to our users will help us redirect our efforts towards a common goal and save tons of resources, including time and money. In this step, we aim to 1) collect information on the user’s strong pain points/problems to understand how we can potentially empower their lives, 2) have a good starting point from which we can begin brainstorming and mapping out solutions. Once we’ve conducted enough customer interviews, the PM should begin working alongside designers and engineers to process the information available to them and collaborate to discover a feasible and effective solution in solving the user’s pain points. Make sure to strengthen your commitment and love for your customer throughout your product lifecycle, not just in the discovery phase.
2. Fall In love with your data: The beautiful thing about data is that it tells you exactly how you can perform better. If utilized properly, it can be shaped to draw images that your users cannot do during your interviews. Tons of applications are now available to help you collect data on your user experience and pinpoint the exact areas of opportunity for improvements within your product; Mixpanel is the one that comes to mind right now. However, just like our point earlier, data utilization should be consistent throughout the product lifecycle to continuously deliver guidance on your potential product/market fit, performance, and competitive advantage.
3. Fall in love with your product team: As mentioned in yesterday’s article, great products don’t build themselves; great teams do. Always lean on your product team for guidance, support, and collaboration. If you have a strong enough relationship with your team members, they will share thoughts and points-of-view that you might be missing out on based on their diverse skillsets; this is why diversity is important within product teams. During my time at Apple, our leaders always stressed the importance of adopting a “Fearless Feedback and Open Communication” mentality to spark conversation and share perspectives. At the end of the day, PMs are human, and sometimes we miss a piece of the puzzle, lean on your team to help you out.

To conclude, there are many other ways to make sure that you are staying ahead and delivering products that can positively impact your users’ lives, but sticking to certain ideas and projects without the support of clear data will only make your task more difficult. Take everything with a grain of salt, and understand that the goal isn’t to win a trophy for coming up with the best idea but rather to effectively identify, build, and deliver the best solution to a problem. Happy building! :D