Who is your customer? What is (are) their problem(s)?
- B2B vs B2C customers
- Behaviour trumps demography
- Know their goals/needs
- Stack ranking problems
- Pain-killer vs vitamin
What are your customers currently doing and what alternative(s) do they have?
- Knowing your competition
- Understand why your customer is using a particular competitor's product
- Competition also includes DIY solutions
- Understanding and evaluating the strengths and weakness competition
Where/how can learn about your customers?
- Social media such as Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin etc.,
- Easier to get facetime with customers in B2B than B2C
- For B2C, leverage social media to learn high level sentiments and feature requests to formulate initial hypothesis
- Quantitative data such as funnel analysis, heatmaps, conversion ratio etc.
Focus on that biggest problem (opportunity) that your customer would like to have it solved first
Prototype the minimum “loveable” experience you can provide for your customer to solve that problem
Hypothesize, validate using experiments, improve, repeat
Understand your constraints
Invite your designers and engineering friends to the party.
Reduce ambiguity and drive clarity through strategy, goals, roadmap, success metrics, and counter metrics.
Don`t forget your marketing and sales/field/go-to-market friends.
Empathize not just with customers but also with your internal stakeholders to get diverse feedback; also understand their challenges/constraints and priorities.
Be curious and have the willingness to unlearn and learn
Develop first principles thinking
Empower and influence internal stakeholders
Have empathy
A rockstar Product Manager creates an illusion of “obviousness” with the leadership and teams so that they continually know when and where to invest, and what to work on, delivering continuous value to customers and generating sustained profits for the company.
Siddharth Ilangovan, AWS Sr PM