On Series by Sai Dhanak

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On Series

On product
On product

A great product leader (manager or designer) has ground-truth knowledge to be the voice of the customer. And accompanied by robust team-management skills, managers are able to make fast decisions to get the right product, at the right time, to market. See

Product career path⁠

for career trajectories.

Consistent product success only comes from unique customer & market insights, creative product solutions, and disciplined execution across the various functions & teams involved in building & distributing the product — Shreyas Doshi

Research

You are relentless in your pursuit of ground-truth; utilizing user interviews,

contextual design models⁠

, analytics, and market reports, to be the voice of the customer.

The story and the why

Great products start with asking great questions. Great questions lead to a powerful

goal, vision, strategy, and roadmap⁠

. You distill research into concrete human problems, have the business acumen to justify solutions in business terms (CAC, LTV, ROI, margin, BOM, COGs, etc), and flex the product narrative based on the audience (sales, support, engineering, C-Suite).

Team mechanics

You are precocious in; understanding

what stage a team is in⁠

resolving conflicts with different personalities⁠

, and using good judgment in executing and monitoring work using the right methodologies (scrum, kanban, waterfall,

DORA⁠

, etc). You’re also organizationally dextrous and can form strong bonds and collaborations across departments.

Planning

Your roadmaps are based on real business and customer insights, and derived from concrete objectives and key results, that ideally ladder up to the company’s overall objectives. You can scale up or scale down the timeline: dreaming in years, planning in months, and measuring in weeks.

Shipping

Armed with the voice of the customer, the why, and a motivated team, you can work within your constraints and make game-time decisions to consistently deliver value, even with little data. Whether that is one large product, or incremental deployments that compound. You can relentlessly balance between offensive work (vision, customer, business) and defensive work (debt, security, privacy, DevOps), and you can navigate the needs of sales, support, and marketing to get everything ready for launch. You ruthlessly cut scope and ask how you can half the timeline and double the impact.

A product manager’s responsibility is to figure out what the product should do and then create the spec (the description of how it will work) as well as the messaging (the facts you want customers to understand). Then they work with almost every part of the business (engineering, design, customer support, finance, sales, marketing, etc.) to get the product spec’d, built, and brought to market. They ensure that it stays true to its original intent and doesn’t get watered down along the way. But, most importantly, product managers are the voice of the customer. They keep every team in check to make sure they don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal—happy, satisfied customers. — Tony Fadell

Measurement

All hypotheses from your

Product Brief⁠

are measurable as soon as someone outside the development team starts using it. Measurements are

reported⁠

regularly to stakeholders, and inform the plan.

Documentation

To think well is to

write well⁠

. Documentation whether it be; product briefs,

PRDs⁠

, business cases, memos, or emails, are; concise, semantically precise, and to-the-point. Documents are so well structured that whole projects can be handed off with one slack message. And for more senior leaders, your fluent and frequent updates (newsletters, memos, demo days) to stakeholders ensure teams are celebrated and keep customer-facing teams informed. See

PRD⁠

for a head-start.

Make it visual

Whether it’s product briefs, roadmaps, UX, etc, they will be more understandable and memorable when visualized, given that

50% of people’s brain’s are wired for visual comprehension⁠

Technical fluency

You can think about and visualize the

architecture of the product⁠

from the genesis of a product, understand technical tradeoffs, the

fundamentals of computer science⁠

, and hold technical conversations with engineers and designers. You are also well versed in the interface, accessibility, and copy guidelines of the major platforms (web, Android, iOS).

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