Product Management Essentials

More and more organisations are moving away from a traditional top-down approach, whereby senior management determines ‘upstream’ what people ‘downstream’ should be doing.

Companies like Spotify have been very successful in creating autonomous and cross-functional teams. The success of this approach doesn’t only come from the cross-functional and collaborative nature of Spotify teams; people within these teams are also very close to the customer. The People in the company are the product.

The primary focus has to be on the problems faced by customers. Instead of features, one can opt to provide themes, based on what the customer wants and what problem is solved.

Themes are a promise to solve problems not to build features. Once you’ve truly understood customer problems, you can start prioritising. Prioritisation is best done through the lens of the core product management principles: first, is it valuable; second, is it usable and third, is it feasible?

Product management and product leadership are people-first roles. Teams are made up of individuals who each bring their own personalities, perspective, and opinions. Understanding what makes people tick makes it easier to get the best out of them and identify when there is a problem.

Being an empathic product leader doesn’t mean you have to be all things to all people but you’re able to engage emphatically with others, even if they don’t have a lot in common with them.