Question: How do you navigate between making data informed decisions and intuition informed decisions? Imagine you are a PM at a startup and you have no data on user engagement to work nor do you have the resources needed to conduct an extensive user study. How do you decide then on which features to include or remove?
I found the “What is not product management” section to be particularly insightful. As a product manager, you have to realize that you are not the boss and you are not acting from a position of power over your designers or engineers. Telling an engineering to work faster or work more is not going to get the product launched on time. However, scrapping some non-essential features and simplifying the requirement list might. Being a leader without being authoritative is a tough but an important skill I want to learn and improve upon.
The “Steve Jobs” trope is a particularly funny example of a bad product manager. Being Stanford students, I think we inherently have a heightened sense of ego about what we know and how it compares to what others know. At the end of the day, we are going to be designing products for everybody, not just other Stanford students or users we perceive to be like us. Thus, creating products with a Steve Jobs mindset that the users don’t know what they want is not entirely correct or productive.
Navigating ambiguity is also a big part of the product manager’s job as often times, you will be working on creating something new that did not previously exist. If there was a tried and tested playbook for creating successful products, every startup would be a success and we would never have product failures like the iPod Nano. Creating new products is an uncertain task and its unlikely that every product you create will be successful. However, successful product managers should know how to navigate this pool of uncertainty to come to positive outcomes consistently and be able to replicate this over and over again.
