What makes someone a good Product Person?
Lisa Dziuba
26 replies
a good product manager, product marketing manager, designer, developer, founder 💛
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Lisa Dziuba@lisadziuba
Don’t Panic by Lemon.io
I think it's three key skills:
1) User empathy
2) Data obsessions
3) Talent to collaborate cross-functionally
Your ideas?
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Warmup Inbox
Curiosity will be the first requirement that comes to my mind. You need to ask 5 times why when the customer gives you feedback. Product management is also usually for jacks of all trades rather than specialists, and it is more likely to become a jack of all trades when you are curious.
Then you need to have a good balance between creative and analytical thinking. You need to know how to brainstorm, and you need to know how to kill ideas when rationality tells you to.
Thirds will certainly be interpersonal skills. You will not work alone, so you need to know how to get stakeholders buy-in.
@fabian_maume love your mention of curiosity and its connection to jack-of-all-trades and being a product manager. With individuals like this it is important to have proper guidance. It's easy to overlook this bundle of skills and talents and fall into the trap of imposter syndrome.
@fabian_maume btw you should definitely check the product we launched today and give us some feedback (maker: @forst)
Someone who is caring and kind. Someone who understands what their team wants and needs to perform at their 100%. Someone who can look into the eyes of a person and realize what they are struggling with. Someone who just knows what the right thing to do is when things aren't working out.
Then, if you're that person the right decisions you take just pile up until you end up with building the best team possible, who in turn end up building the best product that the rest of the world just loves because it was built from the heart and nowhere else.
Don’t Panic by Lemon.io
InTab 2.0
polish...polish...polish!
talking a lot and having lots of ideas are a red flag for me!
a good product person knows how to limit the number of ideas/suggestions/features and executes them with an extreme level of polish and quality.
users will never thank you for a feature full of bugs even if it's the most innovative idea on earth.
- Product Sense
- Backed by Numbers
- Stakeholder management
Bonus Article: https://abhinavunnam.medium.com/...
Sales Sparrow by True Sparrow
Ability to keep shipping, learning, launching, iterating.
Don’t Panic by Lemon.io
@nishith_shah always keep iterating 🙌
@nishith_shah Nicely said Nishith!
Wellbee
Fail fast - Try to shorten the feedback loop. In tech failing stuff is how we learn, it’s better to fail at the start of the project rather than At the end. Be prepared to fail and learn from that.
Validate ideas - Be sure that you are bringing value to customers. Validate ideas instead of jumping into long development loops and understanding that no one needs your product.
Make mistakes - Analysis paralysis is a bitch. Tech is growing fast these days. We can’t sit plan for half a year when we need to act now. Everyone is afraid of failure and mistakes when planning. Just embrace it and understand that you will fail, so try to learn from that and regroup your team.
Learn the domain - Try to learn about the market that we are working in. We can’t build what we don’t understand.
Be a hacker and a hustler - No one will bring you stuff. Hustle your way up. Find shortcuts and get your hands dirty. Find ways to hack the system by thinking outside the box.
Carpio 2.0
The skill of not being in love with their idea, but with the problem.
1. Focus on the user
2. Understand user personas at a deep level
3. Use data to make decisions
4. Leverage the roadmap as a vision document, not a to do list
5. Always iterate and improve personally, the team, and the product
Don’t Panic by Lemon.io
@tim_adair 💯 true
The ability to act on user feedback promptly and the proactiveness when it comes to delivering features that customers need down the line.
I would say someone with full-stack experience. They understand the root pain points of the user, knows how convert those problems into potential solutions, can prioritise candidate solutions based on time + implementation complexity and can then sell the solution effectively to the rest of the team and the world!
curiosity, empathy and good communication
Don’t Panic by Lemon.io
When it comes to product design it's all about the thoroughness and the right amount of perfectionism. @amadej_tauses made Carpio 2.0 (product we are working on) perfect by really understanding the problem from the user's perspective, great technical skills and good eye for aesthetics.
If it weren't for him, we wouldn't be launching today on Product Hunt:)
Ravi Mehta's 12 Competencies (https://www.ravi-mehta.com/produ...) in combination with Kate Leto's Product EQ (https://www.kateleto.com/hiring-...)
Marriage to solving a problem not trying to find a solution (also an ability to conduct actionable user interviews/listen).
Are you familiar with Jobs to be Done and the Keno Method? (these are two foundations of my methodology)
I would say:
1) Organization & systems building
2) Agility
3) Strategic reactivity to insights/data
4) Collaboration
5) PASSION for the craft