They are not able to meet customer demands better than alternatives

Reason Products Fail

This is the most important concept in product development. Target customers and their needs define market and solutions you have developed defines product. If product does not match with the market, you fail.

Product Market Fit

This pyramid identify the hierarchy for product development

Product Market Fit Pyramid

Lean Manufacturing is a concept generated by japan manufacturing giants like Toyota with the purpose of reducing waste. This process is consist of 5 cyclical steps.<ol><li>Define Target Customer</li><li>Identify pain points & undeserved needs.</li><li>Create value proposition.</li><li>Identify feature set.</li><li>Create UX</li></ol>

Lean Product Process

There is a great example of Space pen. Core of the story is NASA wanted a pen worked on space because standard pens weren’t working because of zero gravity. Cost was 6m$ but at the same time Russians went to space with red pencils.Product managers should stay at problem space.

Problem Space vs Solution Space

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

The Lean Product Playbook

The pandemic has shuffled the way we work. Many people are switching jobs and career paths, and “non-tech” people are considering a career in tech. If you are interested in turn-of-the-century literature and want to spend your college years doing research and writing essays, do it. You can use it in a tech career.

Changing from "non-tech" to a tech career

Older individuals who have studied the humanities, History, Art, and English are very successful creators, analytical thinkers and researchers. They can take complex problems and find novel solutions. But there has been a shift. According to PBS, only 5 percent of college graduates earned liberal art degrees in 2018. Instead, young people opt for a degree that will lead to a high-paying job and are told they can't make money with a liberal arts degree. However, that is incorrect. Many who have studied humanities have enriched the tech industry.

Humanities enrich the tech industry

Liberal arts students learn how to approach problems from many different perspectives. By regarding these different lenses, they gain a much rounder understanding of a problem and can find solutions that consider the various needs of all the constituents. The tech industry can benefit from the inclusion of people from all academic, professional, and life backgrounds. So use what you already know and consider getting a non-technical role first and then transition into a technical role.

Tech needs more than STEM majors

<ul><li>Seek out new knowledge. Take courses, learn the language, and become friends with those who know things you don't.</li><li>Work with intelligent people. Seek out teams who are smarter than you and work with people you can learn the most from.</li><li>Align yourself to the quality of your product and the quality of your business outcomes.</li><li>Advocate for yourself and the career you want to build.</li><li>Find allies.</li></ul>Be uncomfortable in situations where you don't understand what's happening around you and unreasonably convinced in your ability to learn.

How to grow that first gig in tech into a successful career

Think you can't get a job in tech with a liberal arts degree? Follow these tips to reshape your skills and mold your career in tech.

Apr 2022

Yes, you can build a successful career in tech with a liberal arts degree

Right amount of urgency is needed in order to get things done quickly or to drive progress. But too much urgency can lead to destruction of team's morale and productivity and Too little can induce lethargy or stagnation.

Urgency As A Tool For Team's Productivity

Urgency meansimportance requiring swift action.

There are two types of unnecessary urgency <ol><li>Fake urgency - self inflicted or external influencer</li><li>Avoidable urgency - something could’ve been avoided and wasn’t - created based on procastination or by poor time management </li></ol>Both can kill a planned workday. Save urgency for important matters that are critical and unavoidable

Understanding Unnecessary Urgency

<ul><li>Always act in ways that maximize benefit – and minimize harm</li><li>Create a Plan of action</li><li>Working in a way that makes team members lives easier </li><li>Measure twice and cut once - strive to do things right the first time </li><li>Prioritize by importance </li><li>Minimize procastination </li><li>Plan multiple steps ahead </li></ul>Cultivating a proactive mindset can help control the kinds of urgency you accept and propagate. use urgency with care, and avoid creating unnecessary urgency for others

Cultivate Proactive Mindset 

Implement a proactive system to manage your work effectively and boost productivity. when requesting work, state the deadline, and make sure your team does the same. Stay organized and manage activity by time

Staying In Proactive Zone

Manage urgency by balancing the following, tune each dials based on the situations<ol><li>Time </li><li>Scope </li><li>Quality </li><li>Bring in more resources </li><li>Use budget to outsource things </li><li>Risk - reduce risk by cutting </li></ol>

Urgency Can Be Adjusted

For external urgency, try to be responsive and not reactive. When there is urgency, <ol><li>Pause your work</li><li>Acknowledge the task </li><li>Evaluate </li><li>Prioritize & decide on course of action </li></ol>Ask why the issue’s urgent – or whether it’s really urgent at all. If you do this politely and firmly, people will see that you’re focused on what’s important.

Respond Or 

To mobilize the team into action, you’ll need to communicate deliberately and clearly the task at hand. That starts with demonstrating that you care about the task and committing fully when it’s truly urgent.Some key points,<ol><li>set accountable deadlines </li><li>Cultivate a culture of accountability </li><li>Allow team to ask "why of the task" question </li><li>Inspire actions by acknowledging and rewarding the team</li></ol>

Driving An Internal Urgency

In today’s fast-paced workplace, many things are made out to be urgent – when they’re really not. The key to working in a sustainable, successful way is to recognize and reduce unproductive urgency while seeking out opportunities to maximize productive urgency.

Leverage the power of urgency to avoid burnout and increase performance Urgency—that frantic feeling that we need to be doing more, and faster—is a destructive force in today’s workplace. Unnecessary urgency can be toxic, causing stress and burnout. But not all urgency is bad, and sometimes we really do need to get things done quickly. Too little urgency can lead to inaction and lost productivity. So how do we find the right balance where we can use urgency as a meaningful tool to keep productivity up, without generating burnout? Urgent! is a guide to using urgency for good to help achieve your goals, to drive success, and minimise stress for yourself, your teams, and your business. This book will teach you to moderate urgency for yourself and those you lead. In our age of fast-paced technology, it’s easy to swing between extremes, working reactively one minute, and being inactive the next. The middle ground, described in this book, allows us to work in the “Active Zone” where we maximise proactivity and productivity. By following the practical strategies outlined in this book, readers will learn to understand urgency, become proactive rather than reactive, and lead teams to their fullest potential. • Eliminate stress and burnout for yourself, your teams, and your businesses • Learn how to dial urgency up or down, depending on the situation • Keep teams working in the optimal productive zone by moderating urgency • Stay focused on what's important and learn prioritisation skills to avoid burnout If you feel that you and your team are caught up in busy work, stressed to the max by competing demands, leaving no room to focus on what really matters, Urgent! will show you a new way of thinking, leading, and responding. Learn the skills to reduce overload, get more done, and achieve better performance each day.

Urgent!

<ul><li><div>Product sense is not something you need to be born with. It's a learned skill, just like any other PM skill. </div> </li><li><div>You do need to develop your product sense muscle as you move up in seniority, and there are four ways to do so. </div> </li> </ul>

How Do I Develop Product Sense ? 

<ul><li><div>Product sense is the skill of consistently being able to craft products (or make changes to existing products) that have the intended impact on their users </div> </li><li><div>It relies on (1) empathy to discover meaningful user needs and (2) creativity to come up with solutions that effectively address those needs </div> </li> </ul>

What Exactly Is Product Sense ? 

<ul>
<li>Building empathy: Observe people interacting with products.</li>
<li>Deconstruct everyday products</li>
<li>Improving creativity: Learn from great product thinkers</li>
<li>Be curious about changes in technology and your domain</li>
<li>Use product sense to drive user value and business impact</li>
</ul>

Building Product Sense

<ul><li><div>Pay attention to micro details and ask yourself why people react to your product the way they do </div> </li><li><div>Observe their facial expressions as they try various aspects of your product, and try to spot moments when they're hesitant, confused, excited, etc. </div> </li><li><div>In those moments, ask open-ended questions to better understand not just how they feel but, more importantly, why </div> </li> </ul>

Observe People Interacting With Products 

<ul><li><div>Spend one or two hours a month trying out new products and deconstructing them to strengthen your intuition and identify common UX best practices and paradigms. </div> </li><li><div>Observe yourself using everyday products to gain insight into people’s motivations and needs. </div> </li> </ul>

Deconstruct Everyday Products 

<ul><li><div>Every detail about the user experience matters </div> </li><li><div>Spend time understanding user problems and framing them in a way that sets strong constraints for the team </div> </li><li><div>Understand why a problem exists and frame it clearly </div> </li><li><div>Identify enough constraints that only a few solutions will be left, streamlining the decision-making process </div> </li> </ul>

Learn From Great Product Thinkers 

<ul><li><div>Changes in the industry create opportunities for launching new products that can address user needs in new ways. </div> </li><li><div>There are two levels of emerging trends to keep track of: macro and micro </div> </li><li><div>Macro: important platform shifts (e.g. web3, AR/VR, AI) </div> </li><li><div>Micro: changes in regulations and new privacy protection laws </div> </li><li><div>Keep an open mind about new technologies, don’t dismiss them as a fad </div> </li> </ul>

Be Curious About Changes In Technology And Your Domain 

<ul><li><div>As you get better at it, you will: Notice subtle things about products and people that you would have missed before </div> </li><li><div>Anticipate non-obvious user problems </div> </li><li><div>Develop higher-quality hypotheses about product experiences to build </div> </li><li><div>Contribute more unique insights to your team </div> </li><li><div>Be right more often than not about what impact a change to a flow has on metrics </div> </li> </ul>

How To Tell If You’re Getting Better At Product Sense 

Stashed ideas

How to develop product sense

You need to select the right metrics to measure the success of the product or feature you're building.Once selected, metrics help the product development in many ways:<ul><li>They provide direction for the product development</li><li>They offer data to make better decisions</li><li>They help measure the impact of new features</li><li>They provide alignment across teams</li><li>They help identify problems</li></ul>

Benefits of product metrics

Answer these questions to find the right metrics for your product:<ul><li>Primary output metric — When will you call your product a success or failure?</li><li>Input metrics — What milestones will your product hit before it becomes a success?</li><li>Check metrics — Are you screwing up other company metrics while building your product?</li><li>External dependent metrics — What external metrics outside of your control are required for your product to be a success?</li></ul>Tap the image to see example metrics for improving revenue/ride at Uber.There are two more examples in the article if you're curious (Netflix and Amazon Prime).

The right set of metrics

<ul><li>Define metrics in such a way that they are measurable and can be tracked on a regular basis</li><li>Define the increment in the metric that your product will bring: "Increase average session length from 5min to 8min"</li><li>Define the time period in which that metric will be achieved: "Increase survey completion rate from 2% to 5% within 3 months"</li></ul>

Best practices for defining metrics

The difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful product is the selection of the right metric to measure the success of the product. Without a measurable success metric your product is…

The Lean Product Playbook

Yes, you can build a successful career in tech with a liberal arts degree

Urgent!

How to develop product sense

Input-Output Metrics for Product Managers

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