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Inspired by Marty Cagan

The Rabbit Hole is written by Blas Moros. To support, sign up for the newsletter, become a patron, and/or join The Latticework. Original Design by Thilo Konzok.

Key Takeaways

  1. Best teams tackle risks upfront before building
    1. Value risk – will customers want the product?
    2. Usability risk – can users easily learn how to use it?
    3. Business viability risk – do all internal stakeholders align?
    4. Feasibility – can your team build it?
  2. The best products are defined and designed collaboratively – product, design, engineering working together
  3. All about solving problems and accomplishing business results, not about adding features.
  4. Two essential activities in all product teams – discover the product to be built, deliver the product
    1. Discovery reduces risk – determine if the user will buy / value the product before you build. Build prototypes to learn quickly and cheaply. Be able to answer the following questions – what business objective does this address? How will you know if you’ve succeeded? What problem does this solve for the customer? What is the target market?
    2. MVP should be a prototype and not a product
  5. 4 key responsibilities of the PM – Deep knowledge of the customer, data, of the markets and industry trends, and how your product helps the business overall
  6. The key role of a product manager is evaluating opportunities and deciding what gets built and delivered to customers. They are filling the product backlog and gain confidence that what is there has value to customers
  7. Roadmaps can be dangerous because they tend to focus on features rather than the underlying problem
  8. With each product release, focus on one persona or target market
  9. Strive to have as many reference customers as possible. These are paying customers, not friends and family or actively using your product and are open to talking to potential customers about their experience. There is no better sales tool.
  10. Fake door – can put in a new feature you’re thinking of building into the right place in the app, see who clicks and recruit people to talk to about the feature
  11. When doing discovery calls, see if they’d be willing to pay or recommend friends. Can also see if they’d be willing to get on calls often to help iterate and learn and improve the product
  12. Best companies are strong in innovation and execution

What I got out of it

  1. An actionable guide on product management and the steps to give you the best odds of building a great product