post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Guest Post

A case study: Launching a product process in a project-based company

Product Management

What I wish I knew sooner in product: Lessons from the community

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! 🎉

How much are product managers getting paid in 2024?

Leading product ops at Delivery Hero with Koen Dubelaar

Connecting fans to creators at Spotify (Dariusz Dziuk, Product Lead, Spotify)

“You’re not as competent as you think” 5 lessons from Ken Chin on navigating a product career (CPO, Spark Networks)

Everything wrong with the product management job market. And how to fix it

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

<a href="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/focus.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/focus-300x200.jpg" alt="" title="focus" width="300" height="200" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-1315" srcset="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/focus-300x200.jpg 300w, https://www.mindtheproduct.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/focus.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>At a <a href="http://www.producttank.com" title="ProductTank">ProductTank</a> last year one question from the audience made me want to jump up on stage and answer it myself &#8211; &#8220;where does the innovation and creativity go if product managers are defining all the products?&#8221;. Stop, I wanted to shout, you&#8217;re doing it wrong.
A lot of people new to the concept of product managers see us as interfering interlopers who design the product, define the solutions, and then throw it over the wall to get built. This may have been true 10 years ago but today we know better.
Product managers should not focus on designing solutions &#8211; they should focus on defining and prioritising problems. Focusing on the problem instead of the solution has a ton of benefits:
<ol>
<li>You focus your time on the user&#8217;s need, what you&#8217;re trying to solve and why you need to solve it &#8211; not how.</li>
<li>Your research automatically skews towards a deeper understanding of the user.</li>
<li>Your user stories and personas become rich in background information which helps everyone involved make connections and find solutions that might not otherwise be obvious.</li>
<li>You avoid optimising for local maxima &#8211; instead of focusing on one single solution focusing on the problem and describing it well to the team opens up a much wider universe of solutions.</li>
</ol>
Once you&#8217;ve done the research and defined, described and prioritised the problems, you work with the delivery team to collaboratively design the solution to that problem that best gets the job done. That way everyone&#8217;s creativity can be brought to bear and you will get a much better end result.
One of my proudest moments at Huddle was when a developer came up to me after a story writing session and presented a 10 minute solution to a problem that had been scoped out as a 3-5 day job (not that we counted man hours mind). This was only possible because he had a perfect picture of the user and the problem the user had.
So keep asking yourself &#8211; what problem are you trying to solve?

core/freeform

What is Product Management?

Interpreting the product Venn Diagram with Matt LeMay and Martin Eriksson

Why Product Management Should not be Responsible for Project Management

20 years of product management in 25 Minutes by Dave Wascha

The Evolution of a Product Manager – Josh McWilliam

Product Management Tools in Everyday Life – Oisin Zimmermann (ProductTank Oslo)

Focus on the problem, not the solution

Martin Eriksson

Read more

Comments