Great Product Managers Focus on the User And The Problem More Than The Solution

There are many things that separate a good product manager from a great one.

But there is one aspect that holds truer than all else.

I summarised this in a tweet👇

It might make sense to unpack this a little more

Product Managers do this:

1. Ideate: Think of possible solutions, then pick the one that makes the most sense from an ROI perspective.
2. Align: Try to convince others that their ideas are good and are the best ones to do for now.
3. Execute: work closely with engineers and designers to ensure that the team builds selected solutions in a high-quality and timely manner.

What's wrong with this approach?

Nothing.

These steps are critical for product managers to do if they want to create good solutions.

But before we conclude that thought, let's look at what:

Great Product Managers do:

1. Understand users: They focus a lot on identifying the right users and understanding their needs and goals in life.
2. Understand their pain: then they spend time understanding the pains that users face while trying to meet their goals as identified in step 1.
3. Prioritise: great PMs focus on 1 (or at most 2) pains that are the most painful for the user. They know focusing on more than two will do more damage than good.
4. Brainstorm for solutions: they spend time finding the best people to help them create potential solutions. They know that they might not always have the best ideas, so they find ways, people, and sources to generate a good list of ideas.
5. Align: this is where they get everything together. They prioritise the solutions that lead to the maximum impact on the larger goals. They use that logic to align people with their ideas. When others see the logical and holistic process, they agree to the PMs quickly and easily.
6. Validate: great PMs know that everything until this point is theoretical. So, at this point, they invest energy into validating risky assumptions. This helps highlight blindspots and increase chances of success.
7. Execute: At this stage, they ensure that the team develops the solution they had planned for, that everyone has aligned on it, and that the users have validated it.
8. Measure: once the solution is in the hands of the users, Great PMs validate other assumptions (that they could not validate earlier) and ensure that the solution is solving the pain that the team had identified and prioritised in steps 2 and 3
9. Improve: they learn from all of the above so that when they do it again, they have more confidence and higher chances of success. Great PMs ensure they get better every time.

You might have noticed that Great PMs start with an increased focus on identifying users and their pains. Then, they ensure that the solution built at the end of the cycle stays true to the user and their pains. They ensure that throughout the journey, everyone involved knows who the user is and which user pain the team should focus on. They ensure everyone prioritises the right tasks that tie to the right user and the right user problem.

Most other PMs only focus on the solution. As a result, they forget if that solution truly solves the right problem for the right user. As a result, they might create solutions that either don't work or don't work as effectively as they should.