Love this Ian. What about customer research though? I see very few good PMs who know how to do primary customer research - not usability testing or "how would you like this feature?" - but deep anthropological problem discovery that equips them to ideate and evaluate solutions in their head rather than the more common "throw as much spaghetti at the wall as you can and fail fast" approach. I often see this outsourced to designers with mixed results, or to UX research which is good but lossy and orders of magnitude less efficient.
The best person to comment on this topic - ethnographic research - is Michael Barry, who I took a few classes with at Stanford d.school. Here're some publicly available materials: http://me277-w2014.weebly.com/. Customer research is extremely necessary when you're still finding product market fit, but I wonder how much it still applies to growth stage companies or companies that know exactly what needs to be built to succeed and don't have enough engineering resources.
This is good, but it’s missing the motivation aspect. A top 1% pm could do all this, but why do it for someone else and how can the company motivate and incentivize it? This is what makes such pms rarely stick around vs join or start a startup of their own for more upside
Maybe it is assumed but the working backwards, competitors and market research is quite fundamental in order to come up with a 6 pager narrative. BTW the working backwards link doesn't work for me.
Ian - re: understanding "technical trade-offs," what technical competencies would you recommend new PMs prioritize early on, especially when they hail from non-CS backgrounds?
1. Pay attention to discussions between engineers. You’ll learn about some tradeoffs just through osmosis.
2. When reviewing specs/PRDs with engineers, invite feedback about what parts are complex and offer to iterate to find ways to accomplish most of what you want from a product-perspective in ways that are much simpler from an engineering-perspective.
A 1% PM is close to the user. They periodically talk to users to understand their thinking process and identify improvement gaps. They don't just rely on mundane surveys conducted by external teams and agencies which take weeks and months. They balance the art(emotional) and science(data) part of taking decisions.
Love this Ian. What about customer research though? I see very few good PMs who know how to do primary customer research - not usability testing or "how would you like this feature?" - but deep anthropological problem discovery that equips them to ideate and evaluate solutions in their head rather than the more common "throw as much spaghetti at the wall as you can and fail fast" approach. I often see this outsourced to designers with mixed results, or to UX research which is good but lossy and orders of magnitude less efficient.
I think some degree of research is certainly appropriate but there is some boundary where it’s appropriate to depend on UXR specialists.
Agreed, though it's pretty easy to agree with that statement 😉 Where's the boundary? Or what are some examples, in your opinion?
The best person to comment on this topic - ethnographic research - is Michael Barry, who I took a few classes with at Stanford d.school. Here're some publicly available materials: http://me277-w2014.weebly.com/. Customer research is extremely necessary when you're still finding product market fit, but I wonder how much it still applies to growth stage companies or companies that know exactly what needs to be built to succeed and don't have enough engineering resources.
Does this fit in the “dig for data” bucket ?
"They don’t file a ticket and wait weeks or months for a BIE or analyst to produce it. " - HUGE
Eric, I was actually thinking of you when I wrote out this competency. No lie. You're a role model for this one.
This is good, but it’s missing the motivation aspect. A top 1% pm could do all this, but why do it for someone else and how can the company motivate and incentivize it? This is what makes such pms rarely stick around vs join or start a startup of their own for more upside
What are your thoughts on contributions to culture, growing people around you, empathy for peers in disciplines and customers?
Hey Omar! Those are good, but perhaps second-order, I think. A few in my original list are probably second-order as well (e.g. write good copy).
Researching for a product discovery case study led me to the Working Backward one. It helped a lot. https://open.substack.com/pub/clintononyenemezu/p/enhancing-whatsapps-call-link-feature?r=n0ngs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Thanks for this masterpeace.
Maybe it is assumed but the working backwards, competitors and market research is quite fundamental in order to come up with a 6 pager narrative. BTW the working backwards link doesn't work for me.
Ian - re: understanding "technical trade-offs," what technical competencies would you recommend new PMs prioritize early on, especially when they hail from non-CS backgrounds?
A couple tactics:
1. Pay attention to discussions between engineers. You’ll learn about some tradeoffs just through osmosis.
2. When reviewing specs/PRDs with engineers, invite feedback about what parts are complex and offer to iterate to find ways to accomplish most of what you want from a product-perspective in ways that are much simpler from an engineering-perspective.
A 1% PM is close to the user. They periodically talk to users to understand their thinking process and identify improvement gaps. They don't just rely on mundane surveys conducted by external teams and agencies which take weeks and months. They balance the art(emotional) and science(data) part of taking decisions.