The 9 Fundamental Ingredients to Thrive with Product Management
How to identify and apply what you need to thrive with digital products
Hey everyone,
How are you doing? Is 2024 treating you well enough?
Today is our monthly premium episode. Here’s what to expect:
Free: Overview of 9 critical ingredients of product management. Reading time: 5 minutes.
Premium: Clarity on how to apply the key ingredients and why they matter. Reading time: 20 minutes.
Let’s start our chat with one of my favorite topics: food. I’ve got a stomach-driven decision framework. So, let me elaborate on the similarities between creating digital products and cooking.
Product management is similar to cooking.
As a food lover, sometimes I try my luck following recipes from Michelin Star Chefs. Sometimes, I get eatable results. Most times, I get something that has nothing to do with the original recipe. Even when I strictly follow the recipe step by step, I fail. Why does that happen to me?
Cooking isn’t only about the recipe. It has much to do with how you do it and the ingredients you use. But even when you have everything you need, you may get unexpected results because the secret is your take, love, and approach.
Product management isn’t about deploying suitable frameworks, following processes, and bringing the proper ingredients. It’s about collaborating, using what you have, and getting the best possible result.
In cooking, the Chef has a tremendous impact on the result, as does the product manager. How you play the product management game is equally important to your ingredients. Yet, without the proper ingredients, your chances of success are dramatically reduced.
The ultimate goal of this episode is to give you an overview of key ingredients and help you understand how they enable progress.
We will superficially explore each to understand its essence and how it contributes to progress. Intentionally, I will leave frameworks out as much as possible because that’s not the goal.
Over the years, I observed teams becoming obsessed with frameworks, where implementing the framework by the book became more important than progress. I want to ensure I don’t contribute to this confusion.
Let’s start by getting familiar with the key ingredients.
Recognizing the Right Ingredients
During my Keynotes, I love learning from my audience. I often ask them how they use the ingredients I see as fundamental to product management. I am often surprised by the results.
In April 2023, I spoke at the Agile Swarming Event and invited the attendants to share how often the following ingredients were present in their daily business. I emphasized that having the ingredient available isn’t enough; it’s about using it.
The following image reflects the result I got during the conference. I call it the Product Team Health Check, where 1 means not present in my days and 5 I use it almost daily.
The fundamental ingredients are:
Product Vision → Inspire people to follow an audacious mission
Product Strategy → Define the constraints to reach the vision
Product Goal → Set short-term goals to enable focus
Business Model → Clarify the business dynamics
Value Proposition → Understand your customers’ situation and how your product or service drives value
Naming Assumptions → Identify what you don’t know
Testing Assumptions → Prioritize critical assumptions and test them
Learning from Failures → Generate insights from small failures
Measuring Outcomes → Continuously evaluate how the output delivered drives value
Now, it’s your turn. I invite you to assess your situation and do the same as I mentioned. How present are the following items on your daily business?
The results of this exercise can be frustrating and even make you feel powerless. I’ve already seen that happening several times. Being in a situation where most key aspects are missing is normal, but remaining in this situation is a choice.
You may wonder where to start if everything is missing. In theory, from top to bottom, but that’s unrealistic unless you have a strong decision power like a CPO, VP of Products, or Product Director. From a product team perspective, you can start immediately with assumptions, naming, testing, and sharing the learnings. That will give you the required conversations to implement the other aspects.
Now that you know the ingredients. Let’s discuss each of them on a high level to build an understanding of what they are for, and you can benefit from them.
1 - Product Vision
I observe frequent confusion between the company’s mission, vision, and product vision. Whenever I mentor product professionals, I’m asked if they are the same. Let me try simplifying it for you.
The company mission answers why the company exists, while the vision is what it wants to achieve. In contrast, the product vision is more specific and answers where the product aims to be in three to five years.
In startups, it’s common to have a vision and product vision that are the same because there’s only one product. But as the company grows with multiple products, a need for a company vision and multiple product visions becomes relevant.
Before explaining a product vision in detail, I want to ask you a few questions.
Do you know why it matters working on your product?
Are you on a mission to reach something you care about?
Can you connect your daily activities with an overarching vision?
The more you struggle to give a yes to these questions, the more you miss a compelling product vision.
A meaningful product vision will put your team on a mission by inspiring and motivating them to progress. Without that, teams get lost because they don’t know what they are fighting for.
Setting a product vision is daunting because it requires alignment, collaboration, and decisions on where to land and what to leave out. A great vision is memorable, audacious, achievable, and inspiring.