Product Leadership: How Top Product Managers Launch Awesome Products and Build Successful Teams

A mediocre process can be reformed into an excellent process by great people, just as a mediocre team can undermine even the best process. Choose the team first, and then decide what process amplifies their best efforts.

To give you an example of what that hyper-speed research looks like, we just did this two weeks ago where on day one we were exploring lots of solutions with divergent thinking. Day two is where we regroup with the engineers and product managers to converge ideas and kind of figure out what we’re really trying to learn. Day three, we’re finalizing

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”

Along with finding out who pays you the money, it’s important to understand who influences the use of your product and who evangelizes your product. In complex product sales the person buying from you (e.g., line manager) may not be the person paying you

Switching from whatever product or solution they use today has a real cost, so your solution doesn’t just have to be better — it has to be so much better it’s worth the effort to switch.

Avoid the expense of failure and product debt by doing as much lightweight testing as is reasonable. This is the best way to ensure that what you’re building is going to be useful and usable.

Only once you know where the value flows to and from can you know which unit economics to use to measure the product’s success or failure.

Most people prefer either building something from scratch or joining an established team. There are the extremely rare people who can do both.

Language is the point of creation, whether it be written, verbal, or body language. Your team picks up on those cues.