Instead, its core responsibility is to look ahead and inform the builders/operators of the product what the right path is to achieve the goal. Product management does nothing to directly build or operate the product for customers. To this end, the vast majority of people in a company are directly working towards providing a product/service to customers: they are building the product (engineers and designers), taking it to market (marketing and sales), or helping existing customers (support). The focus of all employees in a company should be to fulfil the company’s mission, whether that mission is to earn billions, create social good, or both. Principle A: Maximize impact to the mission I wish I had written this first, but frankly I needed to learn it. Making Good Decisions as a PM is about principle A, Ruthless Prioritization and Applying Leverage as a PM were about principle B. In retrospect, most of my previous posts are simply derivatives of these two principles. Great product managers fuse these two principles into all their decisions and everything they do should derive from them. The right is defined by creativity, intuition, and empathy.
The left is defined by logic, research, and rigour. These two principles represent the left and right sides of your brain. Accomplish everything through others: PMs do not directly build or operate the product, instead they enable those around them to do it better. Maximize impact to the mission: develop a product strategy that maximizes the impact to an organization’s mission given a set of inputs.ī. The first principles of Product Management can be reduced to:Ī. That’s what this post is about: w hat are the foundational propositions and assumptions of product management that cannot be deduced? Left Side, Right Side If first principles can help a PM align their team around what’s most important in a product, I believe they can also serve PMs in thinking about the craft of product management itself. What about first principles for the craft of Product Management? This enables people around the PM to move quickly in the same direction, decouple, and make smart trade offs without their presence. Features should be interoperable, just like Legos.įirst principle thinking helps PMs because as companies scale, communicating the rationale behind historical, current, and future decisions can be simplified in a way that their team and stakeholders can rally around. A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”.Īn example of one that we use for our developer platform team are that “all platform features should be like Lego blocks”, meaning that developers should be able to use any combination of features when building an app.
Some of the best PMs I know make their decisions based on first principles.