Main takeaways:
- Framework of learning and improving your product sense
- Learn how to do your skill gap analysis and ideas to level up
- How to build it as a muscle and create successful products
11. How to improve
your Product
Sense?
Manjeet Singh - The Ninja PM
@CoachManjeet
12. What will you learn from this
presentation?
1. Deconstruct product sense
2. Framework to improve
3. Useful exercises to level up
4. Identify gaps to align with continuous improvement plan
5. Lesson learned and key takeaways
13. ● Group PM @ ServiceNow
● Product Manager @HP
● Founder of Agile Fitness
● Various roles@ Startup
Me
16. What is
product
sense?
● Empathy: having good self awareness and
empathy about the user.
● Domain Knowledge: ability to understand what
makes a product great.
● Creativity: ability to find novel solutions to a
situation/problem.
● Business Value: ability to build for value
17. Product sense = The
ability to build for value
● 3 ways to create value
● Think about product value from
the user perspective.
● Sharp product sense + drive to
deliver = ship delightful products.
18. Example questions to test product sense
1. Build a new product to solve for X?
2. How would you build an X [type of product] for Y [user]?
3. How to improve an existing product?
4. What is your favorite product/app and why?
5. Product design, identify KPIs, or user journey mapping exercise
20. Building expertise in any skill involves deliberate
practice, consistent routine, and a daily willingness to
progress beyond physical and mental pain.
21. 1 2 3 4
Framework: correct sequence + right input
Identify
customers
Understand
their problem
and needs
Help create
winning solution
Tell the story
and manage the
product
22. Understand
what makes a
product great
● Utility
● Ease of use
● Delighter/Wow factor
● Strategic alignment
● Overall potential
23. Frame and reframe the problem
● Good problem statements articulate
three elements:
○ Audience- who are you building for?
○ Problem - what is the specific
need/problem?
○ Value - what is the value of solving the
problem?
● A good problem statement aligned with
strategy brings excitement.
Example from Amazon:
25. Exercises:
Identify
user and
product
goals
● Take a popular product that you use
○ Write down who uses the product
○ Write down all of the goals
○ Look at the PR & Marketing material
● Do design teardown exercise
○ wow moments, questions, doubts, broader observation
● Come up with problems not solved in the
product . Then suggest possible solutions to it.
● Consider technical and non-technical products
28. Learn to
identify
good
insights
● Review product highlights:
○ Go to product hunt or app store and read lots of
product reviews by many people.
○ They point out what someone loved and what they wish
was better.
○ Write up where you disagree and discuss with friends.
● Write down your own summary of famous
keynote conferences.
○ Focus on what they think about the product and how
the demo was structured.
○ Read https://stratechery.com/
29. Exercises to
come up
with new
use cases
● Use SCAMPER brainstorming framework.
○ For example, what happens when you combine Dropbox
and Airbnb?
○ Or integrate Facebook for work and Outlook
● Think of adjacent areas beyond a particular
feature.
● Think about how a similar problem is solved in a
different industry.
● Think about how you can leverage it in your
situation.
30. Example: How would you design a bookshelf for children?
● Word association
○ Write all personas
○ Features
● SCAMPER:
○ Substitute
○ Combine
○ Adapt
○ Modify
○ Put to another use
○ Eliminate
○ Reverse
31. Ask experts in your org/network
● It is not your job to have good
ideas. It is your job to champion
them.
● Map out the value curve of your
product space.
● Let team play with your POC and
ask them to think “as user”
32. Strategy: find alignment and
intersection
Bottom up from Customer
● Enterprise use Saas platform to
improve business value gain.
● In ITSM, these consumers are doing
through digitizing and optimizing their
service/process workflows.
Top down from Company
● Enable regular people to route work
effectively through the enterprise.
● Digitize your workflows
● Make work, work better
33. 4 common
ways you can
create new
products
● Solve a problem for people
● Change the experience of an existing product
● Target a fear/insecurity in people
● Make rich people stuff available to commoners
35. Product sense: the ability to make
correct product decisions even when
there is significant ambiguity.
Execution sense: the ability to align
people towards an objective and build
complex projects.
Analytical sense: the ability to frame the
right questions, evaluate a problem from
multiple facets, simulate outcomes, be
able to use data.
10-30-50 framework for growth in the PM Role
Credit: Shreyas Doshicredit : Shreyas Doshi
36. Are you the PM you really want to be?
● Identify your skills and strength
○ What comes easy
○ What you enjoy doing and keep
doing without getting paid
○ What makes you grow
● Not all PM positions are equal
○ Find alignment between your
current responsibilities and the
work that you really want to do.
37. Manage your career like a project
Assess your Skills
today
Gap: Additional Skills
Goal: Become the best
PM leader
39. Become a
student of
useful
frameworks
● AARRR: How to define KPIs
● HEART: How to choose right UX metrics
● 5 W's & H: How to get requirements right
● Hooked: How to build habit forming product
● Cost/benefits/risk: How to prioritize
● 4P’s: Marketing mix
● 5 C’s: Product Pricing
40. Mistakes to
avoid
● Selling yourself on your own idea: "this will work."
● Build products without fully understanding the
customer problems.
● Trying to solve product-market fit by adding loads
of new features.
● Not talking to customer/dev/design teams
frequently
● Believing that releasing a product is the end
goal.
41. Interview
preparation
tips
1. Do targeted preparation based on company/role.
2. Think about persona, solution and mistake you made
from previous similar product (your stories)
3. Be curious to new product insight that are not easy to
find using a quick search.
4. Talk about KPIs- what is one unique KPI to capture value
5. Show your technical abilities. AI/ML/Coding, problem
solving.
6. Talk about creative solutions - baseline plus something
new.
42. 1 2 3 4
Recap: Key Takeaways
Identify gaps in your
strengths, lay out a
plan to improve, and
start deliberate
practice. Everyday.
Become a student of
frameworks and the
continual
improvement
mindset.
Focus on learning,
test your idea quickly.
Strive to become
customer champion
asap.
Be intentional about
who you work with
and what product you
work on.
43. Do not forget to build your ‘Health Sense’
(because when you are sick in bed - all other strong PM senses are
of no use)
-Coach Manjeet
"As you checked in we sent you an email to join our online communities, events, and to apply for product management jobs. As members of the Product School community we'd like to provide you with these resources at your disposal."
Quick overview of my last 10 years and progress in to product management.
GPM at ServiceNow, Working on core revenue generating products.
Before that I was at HP as PM and engineer as startup.
There are many diagrams to explain what Product sense is.
If you search you will find 100K responses.
This is one good way to look at it.
Why health sense - because this is the most commonly ignored sense.
-Also known as Product Intuition, Spidey-sense or Product Judgement
-Ability to make correct decisions even when faced with considerable ambiguity
Empathy. This is the ability to simulate the mental processes of multiple different types of personas that are nothing like you. To be able to say well, in this situation, this type of user is going to react in this manner. Or to say our partners are going to react in that manner, or even our competitors are going to perceive this move in that way. To be able to really do that well is one key element of product sense.
Value = benefit to others.
ServiceNow example
Problem finding or problem definition: problem statements, hypotheses, and riskiest assumption tests.
Stay Hyper focused on Creating, Delivering and Maximizing the value from your product.
To understand and solve a real customer problem, To reduce uncertainty that the product will succeed, To drive sustainable business growth
Exercises: Google Docs, Slack, Airbnb
Problem finding, thus, isn't just a valuable product management skill - it is an incredibly valuable career and life skill.
To understand and solve a real customer problem, To reduce uncertainty that the product will succeed, To drive sustainable business growth
By routinely analyzing other apps, you’ll develop your product thinking and get better at designing apps yourself.
What did we like and enjoy about this product? What “wowed” us?
What questions and doubts do we have?
What other, broader observations did we make?
What can we take away from this experience for Yammer?
The placeholder text in the search bar could have just said “Search here” but instead they mention a specific city. Though I have no intention of going to London, seeing the possibility of it is exciting.
I wonder how many iterations they tried with Dates and Guests only being visible at a later point in the flow. I’m sure many designs have gone through explorations where the Dates aren’t presented until you select a location. This makes me curious about how people search and when they introduce filters to their searches.
Form your own opinion on how their design helps or hinders them in achieving their goals.
Don’t take their reviews as the truth though, remember that they might have bad product sense and might be asking for bad features or misunderstanding the goals.
Use a lot of products and pay attention to how they work. What they’re doing that’s new or common or unique.
https://medium.com/we-are-yammer/product-teardowns-at-yammer-e2c4d5f0e2ff
Write a bunch of products from lots of different categories on separate cards
Pull out 2 cards at a time and brainstorm ways that ideas from one of those products could be applied to the other. For example, Yelp has an active map where you can zoom in and redo a search… Maybe WebMD could make a zoomable map of the human body to search for symptoms.
When you don’t have product-market fit — don’t polish”
🚦 Acting from your gut instead of research.
🏃 Jumping right in to building what you think is right.
It’s really easy to waste a ton of time building out the wrong features
Spend less time on the feed, more time on the search box.
It’s easy to blame the digital world for our distractions, but in part it’s up to us to learn not only when to tune it out, but also how to use it wisely.