Inspired summary

A product manager has two main responsibilities: evaluating product opportunities and defining the products to be built to address those opportunities. To allow her to focus on these tasks, the product manager needs a product team around her, much like a CEO needs a management team to run a company.

This team comprises several well-defined roles:

Good user experience (UX) is a vital component of good products. The iPod, for example, owed much of its success to the pleasant and effortless UX.

To create a good UX, the product manager must work intensively with a UX design team, which ideally comprises four essential roles:

Opportunities for new products are everywhere around us, and new ideas, innovative technologies and shifting competitive landscapes create fresh opportunities every day. They exist even in seemingly saturated markets. Remember AltaVista and Infoseek? Their dominance of the search engine market seemed unassailable until Google came along.

In this endlessly shifting landscape, a product manager must constantly and quickly evaluate product opportunities and decide which ones to pursue. To help achieve this, she should answer a list of questions used to help define and communicate such opportunities, called a Product Opportunity Assessment (POA):

To be successful, a product must be:

All three criteria need to be tested and validated before building the product. To facilitate this, the product manager and her UX interaction designer should first come up with a minimal product prototype: one that has the bare minimum functionality necessary to be valuable, and yet delivers a realistic enough user experience for real users to test.

A key responsibility of a product manager is to deliver accurate product specifications to the engineering team. The most effective way to do this is to build a high-fidelity prototype: a prototype with minimal functionality, but a realistic user experience. In the case of simple websites, for example, the prototype may just comprise clickable buttons that lead to different pages.

The end-goal is a prototype that anyone can easily interact with to understand the product, without necessarily having to look at any product specs.

If you’re a product manager, understanding customers is a critical part of your job. In fact, it’s so important that you should attend every site visit, customer interview and usability test as well as use whatever market-research tools are available to really gain a deep understanding of customers.

Note, though, that customers are notoriously poor at expressing what exactly they want from a product. Therefore, don’t let their input directly steer the course you take with your product. Instead, stay focused on identifying customer needs, and think for yourself how to address those needs.

Effective product management means constantly prioritizing and making choices: Which product opportunities should be pursued? Which features should be included in the product? Which tasks are most important? These decisions are difficult because, typically, every stakeholder in the company will feel strongly and differently about them.

To help resolve these tradeoffs, you should define a set of product principles: your beliefs of what’s truly important to the strategy of this entire product line and the company. In the case of a start-up, the company’s mission statement often embodies these principles.

When improving existing products rather than launching new ones, many product managers fall into a modus of just fixing bugs and adding features as requested. But bolting on features indiscriminately to please specific customers often makes the product less appealing to the rest of the market, hurting its success in the long run.

Just as with new products, product improvement should start with an understanding of what your goals are. You must understand the product’s most important business metrics and gear any improvements toward affecting those metrics. Say your product is a website where a key metric is what percentage of visitors become customers – currently 5%. You may then introduce a new feature to raise that percentage, like an easier sign-up process. If the percentage rises to 10%, you’ve just added a very valuable feature!