post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Guest Post

How to build a companion product and win user trust

mission statement

Deep dive: Crafting your product vision and mission

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Join us at #mtpcon London in 2025 – mark your calendars

How Google makes AI work at Enterprise scale – Miku Jha (Director, AI/ML and Generative AI, Google Cloud)

5 ways to invent and simplify as an AI/ML product manager

Why teams often struggle with OKRs: A conversation with Jeff Gothelf

Building your own user experience and software stack: This week’s product news

Martin Eriksson has 25+ years experience building world-class online products in both corporate and start-up environments for global brands such as Monster, Financial Times, Huddle, and Covestor. He is the Founder of ProductTank, the Co-Founder and Curator of Mind the Product, and a Product Partner at leading venture capital fund EQT Ventures. He is also the author of the best-seller Product Leadership, How Top Product Leaders Launch Great Products and Build Successful Teams (O'Reilly, 2017).

Martin Eriksson

Dave Wascha started as a product manager 20 years ago working on Internet Explorer 4.0. Since then he&#8217;s had his share of successes and failures in a storied career spanning the US and Europe, and in this entertaining and insightful talk from Mind the Product San Francisco he distills those 20 years into twelve key lessons.
Listen to customers&#8230; This sounds obvious but it&#8217;s surprising how little we actually do listen to our customers. Our job as product managers is to maniacally understand your customers&#8217; problems &#8211; and you can&#8217;t do that without listening to them and understanding them.
&#8230;but don&#8217;t listen to customers. While we should listen to customers about their problems &#8211; we shouldn&#8217;t listen to them about the solutions. That&#8217;s our job.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11947" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017.jpg" alt="Dave Wascha at Mind the Product San Francisco 2017" width="2048" height="1365" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017.jpg 2048w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-1024x683.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" />
Watch the competition&#8230; What our competition is doing is a rich source of information that can help us better understand our customer&#8217;s problem. Every time a competitor ships a new product or feature it&#8217;s a free user test for you to understand how the customers respond.
&#8230;but don&#8217;t watch the competition. Stop worrying too much about what the competition is doing. In the tech industry we can get overly excited by new technologies or features, and it is too easy to simply follow the competition into building something shiny and new, even though it might not be the best solution to a customer problem.
Be a thief. Don&#8217;t actually steal anything, but don&#8217;t be afraid to take ideas from others and build on them. Your job is not to come up with all the best ideas, but to make sure you&#8217;re implementing the best one for your customers.
Get paid. Most of us work on commercial endeavours, and when we&#8217;re taking new features and products to market we often forget to ask the most fundamental question &#8211; is this valuable enough for a customer to pay for it?
Stop worrying about getting paid. We are business-casing the soul out of our products &#8211; focusing just on getting paid can lead to a risk-averse culture of small incremental improvements that don&#8217;t focus on the customer experience. Sometimes engaging your customers require things that have no clear ROI.
Speed up. Every time you put off a decision you are destroying value. Cost of Delay is an incredibly important concept &#8211; there are many reasons why we put off decisions but it&#8217;s our job to remove obstacles and make sure that decisions are made &#8211; and made fast.
Say no. We have lots of competing priorities and stakeholders, but our job is not to make people happy &#8211; it&#8217;s to solve our customers&#8217; problem. If sales come to you and ask for a feature for just one customer, you should say no. If the CEO comes to you with a crazy new idea from his cousin, you should say no.
Don&#8217;t be a visionary. Products don&#8217;t need visionaries &#8211; they need product managers who are obsessed with solving customer problems and who put in the hard work to grind it out and solve those problems.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-11948" src="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-wide.jpg" alt="Dave Wascha at Mind the Product San Francisco 2017" width="2048" height="1365" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-wide.jpg 2048w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-wide-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-wide-768x512.jpg 768w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/dave-wascha-mtpcon-sf-2017-wide-1024x683.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" />
Don&#8217;t confuse yourself with your customer. It&#8217;s far too easy to look at your products from your own perspective, but you&#8217;ll probably be wrong. Only by striving to really understand your customers will you be able to solve their problem.
Be dumb. When you&#8217;re starting out you&#8217;re unencumbered by experience and knowledge &#8211; and that&#8217;s not always a bad thing. Companies and product teams drift away from their core mission over time and the best product managers have the ability to be dumb &#8211; to look at things from a customer&#8217;s perspective, and to bring the focus back on to the core customer problem.
Watch this entertaining talk for all the details, soak up some of the wisdom amassed over Dave&#8217;s career, and then think about your own lessons and what you think is key to great product management.

core/freeform

Video

Breaking down misconceptions to create healthier teams by Adrian Howard

Modern-day leadership by Janice Fraser

5 key practices to build a better product, Adam Mullett, ProductTank Perth

Experiment like a boss by Merissa Silk

From opinion-based to evidence-guided product development by Itamar Gilad

A quick look at decision supervision by Lucy Spence

The F words of highly successful product organisations by Saielle DaSilva

Identify and manage imposter syndrome by Phyllis Njoroge

The good, bad, and ugly of OKRs by Jenny Herald

Is your innovation project on track? by Tendayi Viki

20 years of product management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Kraków

ProductTank Cardiff

ProductTank Bangalore

ProductTank Mumbai

ProductTank Johannesburg

ProductTank Tauranga

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Timisoara

ProductTank Stockholm

ProductTank München

ProductTank Düsseldorf

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Heidelberg

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Barcelona

ProductTank Newcastle Upon Tyne

ProductTank London

ProductTank Curitiba

ProductTank Brisbane

ProductTank Perth

ProductTank Málaga

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Braunschweig

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Vienna

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Valencia

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Brno

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Montréal

ProductTank Bangkok

ProductTank San Diego

ProductTank Hong Kong

ProductTank Charlotte

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Manchester