Dave Wascha [1] is an incredibly experienced Product Manager and Director with many years working with international companies such as Internet Explorer, Microsoft,... and he's been doing that since Mark Zuckerberg was 13 year-old.
Here's 13 lessons he wished the baby Dave, who is him 20 years ago, would have known before jumping into the field.
The video
1. LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS (for problems)
The most crucial principle, no dispute.
In this advice, Dave takes an example of Smalt product, which combines mood lighting, Bluetooth music streaming, and salt dispensing in one. It's clear that we can feel a weird sense of why most of the majority would not buy this product. Smalt's campaign on Indiegogo also closed quite early in the progress [2].
2. DON'T LISTEN TO YOUR CUSTOMERS (for solutions)
I empathized with this thought. Customers insights are amazing when it comes to smelling out the problems, but not so for solutions, since "what people say they do, won't mean what they actually do it". So it's best to keep those recommendations for solutions from our users for references.
The example Dave walks us through is Oral-B [3], an advanced technology toothbrush which can sync with our phones, and many other cool stuff. His complain is that somebody has figured out a perfect degree to brush our teeth. Well I can't have comments on this for my lack of knowledge in it's science and applications.
3. WATCH THE COMPETITION
A familiar quote right? It's quite interesting when Dave shows some comments of how his targeted users are commenting on the way they use other company's products on Youtube. I have never encountered that before. Will try to look more on different media.
4. DON'T WATCH THE COMPETITION
I'm gonna quote a statement from Paypal's Co-Founder Peter Thiel on his famous speech " Competition is for losers" at Stanford University in 2014 [4]
It often comes at the tremendous price (of competition) that you stop asking questions that are truly important and valuable. I would say that don't always go through the tiny doors that everyone trying to rush through, and maybe go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one's taking.
5. BE A THIEF
It's okay to copy great ideas, for the purpose of solving customer's problems
6. GET PAID
Ask the customers if they are willing to pay and how much.
7. STOP WORRYING ABOUT GETTING PAID
Amusement or little things of the product that really make customers happy are great, which oftentimes don' bring any ROI to the product.
A funny label in the package, or just ringtones for the website
8. SPEED UP
A funny story from Dave is his team didn't come up with a decision for the problem since the Product Manager couldn't able to hold a meeting room.
Cost of Delay (CoD) is huge, which represent economic impact of a delay in project delivery. And we don't want our product delivery to be negatively affected just because of inactive actions.
9. SAY NO
Stakeholder Management comes in for this. Product Managers' job is to make our customers happy, as well as driving the business outcome, not about making every stakeholder happy
10. STOP SAYING NO
Saying "No", but with right reasons
11. DON'T BE A VISIONARY
I don't have the ability to have comments on this for real 🙂
12. DON'T CONFUSE YOURSELF WITH YOUR CUSTOMER
Relatively the same advice as the 1st one
13. BE DUMB
Stay hungry. Stay foolish - Steve Jobs
Thanks for reading!
Thank you, Ken Phạm. It's actually useful! 😍