Three sentence summary
Product people shape, sync, and ship
Valuable and feasible are Product responsibilities
Know the customers, the data, the business model, and the market trends
1. Shape the product: Harness insights from customers, stakeholders, and data to prioritize and build a product that will impact the business most. Product people must be able to develop their future projection for the product, the vision, and how to get there, the strategy. Setting goals, creating specs, discovery, roadmapping, and product/design feedback cycles must be executed excellently to reach the vision.
2. Ship the product: Ship high-quality product on time and without surprises. This is about quality assurance, fighting for budget/resources, unblocking blockers, going to market, and adjusting resources/priorities when things come up. Ultimately, if it's not live, it doesn't count. When in doubt, ship it.
3. Synchronise the people: Tell a story and align stakeholders around one vision, strategy, goal, roadmap, and timeline to avoid wasted time and effort. Running effective meetings and communicating important information up and down the ladder are vital.
Your job as a PM is to deliver business impact by marshalling your team's resources to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
Defining Product
My first contact with Product design came during technical high school, where technical drawing led to mechanical projects. A few years later, during my engineering studies, I was tasked with the most time-consuming and challenging assignment: to deliver the entire project of a reductor from scratch.
Of course, I didn't have to think about a business model for the device, because it wasn't the point. I had to think about every little part, consider every tolerance for each assembly step. The emphasis was on precision, reliability, and functionality, ensuring each product met rigorous standards and served a specific purpose.
Nowadays, I find myself on a different side of the product management discipline, in a digital world that is much more dynamic and customer-centric. Product is not just a physical object but often a digital experience, a service, or a platform. There's a lot more discussion on understanding user needs, iterating quickly, and continuously delivering value. The focus shifts from purely technical specifications to creating seamless and intuitive user experiences, ensuring the product evolves in line with market demands.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Usable, feasible, valuable, viable
Marty Cagan says that while the engineer owns feasible and the designer owns usable, valuable, and viable, it's the product manager who owns the two of the hardest things to do. And those are pretty big shoes to fill.
It reminds me of desirable, feasible, and viable — the core of Strategyzer's approach to business model testing.
Product people must understand their market drivers and desires so they can create a value proposition that is desirable. They must also model customers’ willingness to pay to keep the product viable with a sustainable profit.
The four key areas PMs must bring to the table are expertise in users/customers, expertise in data, understanding how the business operates (including marketing, sales, and compliance), and familiarity with the competitive landscape.
Product principles and essential skills
Simple is kind
Perfect is not when there are no more things to add, but no more things to eliminate. Always choose concise and simple communication over complex. Don't use more words when less will do. Drop the unnecessary, find the bits of work and effort that will yield the least value, and tactfully eliminate them. Simple is kind is my favourite mantra.
Better every day
We encourage continuous improvement through testing. We believe in Kaizen, the compounding force, the aggregation of marginal gains from being 1% better every day in each corner of the business.
Think big, ship small
Product people must be able to project the future of their product and tell that growth story to stakeholders while navigating the realities of time, capacity, and scope. In 90% of cases, the first two are set in stone, leaving the Product to negotiate the scope to the best of our abilities. Descope and deliver because if it's not live, it doesn't count.
Build for hospitality
Anticipate user needs, pay attention to details, and celebrate the guest. Ancient Japanese hospitality gives us a way to look at what we build and how we build it.
Product people must be guests of the whole product experience. Eat the dog food.
Make it visual
We encourage going beyond the comfort of spoken and written language and tapping into our immense power as spatial thinkers. A prototype is worth a thousand specs, a short video is worth a thousand screenshots — augment with AI, show and tell.
There are four essential skills
Great product thinkers aren’t born, they’re built. While trends and tools come and go, what endures are core capabilities: the muscle groups that compound over time.
Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well, operating from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.
These skills are the quiet force behind confident decisions, crisp communication, and compounding outcomes:
1. Know the customers, who are using this?
2. Be an expert in the data and core behaviours, what and how is it used?
3. Understand the three areas of the business model, how is the product desirable, feasible, and viable?
4. Monitor industry trends and competitive landscape, who's up against us, and how do they play?
Prioritization, is the juice worth the squeeze?
Leveling up and tuning the Product Organization
I use Ravi Mehta’s competency framework to score my strengths and gaps across execution, insight, and strategy. It keeps me honest about where I need to grow — and where I can add the most leverage.
Once a quarter, I step back, take a snapshot, and assess where the product organization is underperforming. When momentum stalls or impact feels shallow, this helps pinpoint whether we lack vision, delivery, or customer understanding.
It’s a tool for reflection — and a prompt for action.
People I follow:
Good reads
The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick
Continuous discovery habits by Teresa Torres
Atomic habits applied to business by James Clear
Influence by Robert Cialdini
Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager by Ben Horowitz
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