Cataloging problems

How do you do your job as a product manager every day if you do not know what problems you have set your product to solve?

One of the most important tasks of a product manager it to catalog problems that prospects / target user base faces.

Just follow the steps and you can get really good at it.

Step 1: Listen to potential users

When you go out to meet people - either potential users or potential customers - you need to listen to what they speak. If you are really good, write it down as soon as possible as you keep listening.

That is just step 1.

Step 2: Look at what they do

As they keep talking, chip in once in a while and ask them what they do and why they do what they do.

While this might seem an innocuous question, it is the most powerful question and has enormous power.

Reason: You are going to get actions from the customer.

Step 3: Listen carefully to the one key thing that they say they are actually looking for.

When customers actually demonstrate to you what they are trying to find out, they will keep pointing to a select few set of things or information that they are actually looking for.

That is the gold mine.

Step 4: Validate what you just inferred.

At times, it makes sense to validate it as soon as you have inferred it. At times it is best to get back and put together what you have.

Present it back and arrive at the one thing that is going to make a difference to him.

While the 4 step process might seem simple, it needs a lot of practice and needs some training.

If you do not have a problem catalog, it is time to start having one now. It is extremely powerful.

Comments

Counterfiet goods and the fledgeling e-commerce market places

India has a nascent and a very active market place. With good interest, the right climate for growth and right product mix, the indian retail marketplace seems to be going places. However, there are some alarming signals that seem to be ignored for growth that have a good chance of being dangerous to all the stakeholders involved. The issue I am talking about is the sale of counterfeit goods in all the indian market places. India has not had a history of strong Intellectual property rights. This time it is getting messier. The Indian marketplace model is very interesting and suits well to a country as diverse as India. The market place model floated by all the major e-railers suits the fact that the seller and the buyer can be connected for serving the needs for every day goods that are not necessarily covered by IP laws. India needs more effective IP laws since it is struggling with some products like traditional indian products that cannot be covered by IP versus modern produc...

Organizational growth and turn over

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.

Finding your target audience

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...

Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Search This Blog