The first job of a product manager is to Build Good Products. The greatest product organizations have some variant of this phrase as a cultural value. Apple talked about “insanely great” products as far back as 1983, even before the introduction of the original Macintosh computer. Y Combinator’s motto is “Make Something People Want.”It is certainly possible to build successful businesses on the backs of “bad products”, but even these products fill a need in the market and are therefore “something people want”. That said, no product manager aims to build “bad products”.
The challenge comes from figuring out how to Build Good Products. There is a ton of literature, advice, and techniques that work for this: Launch early and iterate, talk to your customers, conduct user research, be data driven, user test prototypes and mock-ups, etc. Good mid-career PMs do all of these things.
However, I often see product managers treat these tactics and tools as ends in of themselves. It is all too easy to get lost in the minutiae of user studies, market surveys, and statistical data science analyses, and lose the plot. At these times, it is always good to pop your head up and ask yourself (and if you are a PM Leader, ask your teams) the following question:
Is this a good product?
Some people may think that the answers to this question are subjective, and therefore the question has no place in discussions about product decisions and strategy. While I agree that answers to the question may be subjective, I disagree that the question has no place in a product review.
It is certainly true that there will be a variety of opinions amongst people on a multidisciplinary team and these opinions will often be in conflict with each other. It is ultimately the product manager’s responsibility to be an advocate for the customer and articulate whether this or that decision results in a better product for the customer. So not only does the question have a place in product reviews, I deeply believe that we as PMs are obliged to ask this question. Anything less is a disservice to our customers.
This also leads to a related point about a typical product manager’s career journey. Early in their careers, PMs think that their intuition or gut feel about a product is sufficient to make good decisions. Unfortunately, they are usually wrong. Mid-career PMs learn to trust the tools mentioned above. They become data-driven, lean on user research, frameworks, analyses etc. However, experienced product managers are able to go one level deeper. They have developed pattern recognition skills over many years of experience in a domain and are able to rely on their instincts and make correct calls for products in that specific domain.
This is what it means to truly have “Product Sense”. Strive towards this goal as you keep honing your craft.