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Book summaries
  • Pages
    • Index
      • Radical product thinking
        • Introduction. A Repeatable Model for Building World-Changing Products
        • Part I. Innovating Smarter Requires a New Mindset
          • Chapter 1. Why we Need Radical Product Thinking
          • Chapter 2. Product diseases
        • Part II. The five elements of radical product thinking
          • Chapter 3. Vision
          • Chapter 4. Strategy
          • Chapter 5. Prioritization
          • Chapter 6. Execution and measurement
          • Chapter 7. Culture
        • Part III. Making our world a little more like the one we want to live in
          • Chapter 8. Digital pollution
          • Chapter 9. Ethics
          • Conclusion
      • Escaping the build trap (WIP)
        • Preface
        • Part I. The build trap
          • 1. The Value Exchange System
          • 2. Constraints on the value exchange system
          • 3. Projects versus products versus services
          • 4. The product-led organisation
          • icon picker
            5. What we know and what we don't
        • Part II. The role of the product managr
          • Chapter 6. Bad product manager archetypes
          • Chapter 7. A great product manager
          • Chapter 8. The product manager career path
          • Chapter 9. Organising your teams
        • Part III. Strategy
          • Chapter 10. What is strategy?
          • Chapter 11. Strategic gaps
      • Strategize (To do)
      • UX strategy (To do)
      • Product roadmaps relaunched (To do)
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5. What we know and what we don't
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5. What we know and what we don't

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Known and unknowns
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Known knowns: when kicking off a project, it’s best to begin by identifying what you know to be true about the situation—your known knowns. These are facts that you gather from data or critical requirements from customers. Now not all perceived requirements are necessary, but some of them are. These could be mandated by government regulations, or they could be basic needs that are required to do the job. You need to separate these items out as facts and to label those that you are unsure about as our known unknowns.
Known unknowns are clarified enough that you know which question to ask. They are assumptions that you want to test, data points that you can investigate, or problems that you can identify and explore. You use discovery methods and experimentation to clarify these, turn them into facts, and build to satisfy those facts.
Unknown knowns are those moments when you say, “I feel like this is the right thing to do.” This is intuition from years of experience. Although we should all listen to our intuition, you should also be cautious because this is often where bias thrives. It’s imperative to check and experiment to see whether your intuition is right.
Unknown unknowns are the things that you don’t know you don’t know. You don’t know enough to ask the right questions or identify the knowledge gaps. These are the moments of surprise that need to be discovered. They happen when you are out talking to customers or you are analyzing seemingly unrelated data. They pop up during research. You need to be open to these discoveries and follow through on pursuing them because they could change the shape of your company.
Product management is the domain of recognizing and investigating the known unknowns and of reducing the universe around the unknown unknowns. Anyone can run with solutions based on known knowns. Those facts are readily available. But it takes a certain skill to be able to sift through the massive amounts of information and to identify the right questions to ask and when to ask them. Product managers identify features and products that will solve customer problems while achieving business goals. They optimize the Value Exchange System.
Product managers are the key to becoming product-led.

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