Thread by @fgoldgewicht

After 10 years of (a few) successes and (a lot of) failures as a product guy, I see product management as a combination of mastering 20 incredibly difficult arts. Here is a thread to these 20 game-changing skills #product #productmanagement

Theme 1: Defining product strategy and vision

1/ The art of never dropping the fundamental questions about the product positioning
- Who is the target?
- What is its (real) problem?
- Which use cases and features do we have to build and what are the differentiators with competitors?

2/ The art of finding how to really collaborate with the other actors
- w/marketing guys to identify acquisition channels
- w/sales guys to identify monetization models
- w/users to identify valuable feedback

3/ The art of solving the whole user experience
- User experience do not end at the UI of an app: what happens before and after using the app is important to design

4/ The art of defining actionable success criteria
- Defining the right metrics: qualitative and/or quantitative
- Measuring in a data-driven way vs data-informed way

Theme 2: Defining a product roadmap

5/ The art of prioritizing
Compromising between:
- Maximizing impact on the user experience, the business and the data learnt
and:
- Minimizing the required workload, the required delay to measure and the technical debt

6/ The art of ensuring concise specifications
- Getting everyone on the same page without the need for exhaustive documents

Theme 3: Driving product execution

7/ The art of generating work, not just managing work
- Building a product is not just about delivering predetermined features at predetermined dates -- it's about understanding and solving a problem by driving iterations based on launches and measures

8/ The art of challenging designers and developers
- Being one step ahead of your teammates to be able to challenge them
- Building company standards above market standards

9/ The art of protecting designers and developers
- From the inside: requests from other teams such as marketing
- From the outside: complaints from customers

10/ The art of killing a product or a feature
- The hard path of launching, measuring and sometimes killing a product or a feature

11/ The art of synthesizing
- Consolidating all inputs, all the time, with a minimum effort

12/ The art of problem solving
- The necessity of loving to remove human and technical hurdles on a daily basis

13/ The art of handling the technical debt
- Compromising between execution speed and maintainability + reliability

14/ The art of A/B testing
- When to A/B test and when not to A/B test
- Choosing the right user segments
- Choosing the right statistical methods
- Choosing the right decision tools
- Local vs global maxima

15/ The art of measuring user satisfaction
By measuring:
- User experience quality
- User outcomes
- User loyalty
- The limitations of the NPS

Theme 4: Driving product communication and coordination

16/ The art of communicating the "why"
- Inspiring the vision to the entire team
- Repeating, repeating and repeating the "why", each week

17/ The art of meeting
- The right meetings, with the right people, at the right time, with the right duration

18/ The art of putting ego aside
- Mistakes: learning to be the "responsible" party for the mistakes your team is "guilty" of making, and teaching them the difference between the two
- Successes: accepting that when the team wins, the players are celebrated, not the coach

19/ The art of earning legitimacy
Evangelizing the discipline of product management, its promises, its processes and its tools:
- w/developers and designers
- w/managers
- w/C-Levels

20/ The art of loving relationships
- The necessity of loving to understand people

🙏 @meggie_mellier & @QMenini for the proofreading