A thread of 7 things you already know about discovering, testing, and shipping products
(but tend to forget at times)
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1/ Spending some time upstream to properly understand the problem & the domain will save you from spending a lot of time downstream wondering why people aren’t buying your product.
You can’t learn everything upfront, but you can learn many things upfront.
2/ If you are talking to customers with a certain product idea already in your mind, you will usually manage to find great reasons why it makes sense to build that idea.
Starting with a blank slate keeps a product manager’s biggest enemy—confirmation bias—at bay.
Listening, *really* listening, is a rare superpower.
I was a bad listener most of my life.
Then I fixed that a few years ago.
Night & day difference in my leadership ability.
I learned that we can learn to listen well.
A thread on listening (and learning it from movies🎞️)
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First, why is listening hard?
It’s because we have:
- the fear of being wrong
- an inability to be present
- a desire for validation
- a lack of curiosity
- the urge to impress
- a feeling of superiority
For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.
The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.