My Product Principles

Overview

The job of a Product Manager is incredibly undefined. Are you feeling lost? 😱

Here are my 13 PM Principles to serve as a guiding light. 💫

1. Dream Big: Vision is indispensable. Have a vision, articulate it, and never compromise on it.
2. Maximize business impact: By marshaling the resources of ****your team to identify and solve the most impactful customer problems.
3. Automate yourself: Don’t be the go-to person for the product. Optimize it for internal and external users to find their way from within the product or in the documentation. You should never answer one-off questions, always write or refer to a document. Don’t hoard tribal knowledge or you’ll never grow into a great product manager.
4. Spend 80% of your time in discovery, 20% in delivery: Stay in the “problem space” (who, why, what) and forget about the “solution space” (how). Define the problem well and trust your engineering team to own the solution.
5. Velocity > Speed: Speed without direction is useless. Communicating a vision will help steer the ship.
6. Minimize cognitive load: Your design should make the user think as little as possible, and cut the clutter. Every single core action should be achievable within 3 clicks.
7. Problem manager, not product manager: The role of a product manager is to solve problems for the user and the business, not to build products. Always remember—outcomes over outputs.
8. Treat feedback as a question, not an idea: If someone asks you to make a faster car, ask yourself—what is the right speed for this car?
9. Accomplish everything through others: You are the conductor of the orchestra; you drive the show, but you don’t produce the music. You have to listen, be the communication glue, and aggressively delegate to your functional experts.
10. Get your hands dirty: Your job is to connect the functional roles—and when they don’t exist, you’ll need to fill the gap.
11. Why now?: Just because there’s a problem to solve, it doesn’t mean you have to solve it now.
12. An MVP is not a product: Rather, it is an experiment to prove an idea or risk in product discovery.
13. Objective > Subjective: Back everything with observable or verifiable facts in order to eliminate any personal bias.