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Mind the Product

Product Management

Deep dive: Product engagement

Podcast

It’s not you, it’s them – frustrating things orgs do – Keji Adedeji (Product Leader and Coach)

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

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How to set off on the right product foot in 2025

Should you specialize or stay versatile in product?

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

How Yahoo creates a great experience for its users – Kameron Canbaz (Product Manager, Workflow and UX at Yahoo)

Mind the Product’s top 10 guest posts of 2024

Andres is a freelance writer and digital marketer with a background in engineering and a keen interest in the latest technology advancements. He currently helps tech companies and startups tell their stories by turning their complex ideas into easy to understand material. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn

Andres Phillips

<p>In this <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/producttank-about/content/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ProductTank</a></span> Barcelona talk, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollandrew/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Andrew Moll</a></span>, Head of Product at Abacum explains how the role of the first product manager at a startup can vary wildly from what product managers hired later on or those at larger companies might encounter.</p>
<p>Watch the session in full to see the talk or read on for an overview of his key points:</p>
<ul>
<li>What is product management really about?</li>
<li>What is discovery?</li>
<li>Early-stage research</li>
<li>Product judgment</li>
<li>Being directionally correct</li>
</ul>
<h2>What is Product Management really about?</h2>
<p>Product managers are responsible for achieving results. They are accountable for business outcomes produced by leading both discovery and delivery within a specific problem space. Product managers often find themselves working together with UX researchers, other product managers, product strategists, data analysts, designers, product marketing managers, copywriters, product ops, customer success, engineers, and others.</p>
<p>The common mantras surrounding product managers come from those in larger companies. In a smaller company, the role doesn’t change. Still, product managers won’t have these experts to call on and may find themselves working only with a designer, a customer success, and an engineer, meaning that they are much busier.</p>
<h2>What is discovery?</h2>
<p>Discovery is an exchange of time for an increase in confidence that what we aim to build will solve our customers’ problems. While this is a good definition, again, it is different for new companies and new product managers. Time is expensive, and the speed of delivery is inversely proportional to maturity.</p>
<p>In newer companies, the goals are different as project runways are shorter. In the beginning, product managers will ship to learn about their customer base rather than ship to earn revenue and scale.</p>
<h2>Early-stage research</h2>
<p>Product managers need to increase the confidence in their products to start delivery. But without an existing customer base experiencing problems, this can be challenging. Andrew recommends using the first 15 minutes of sales calls to conduct research.</p>
<h2>Product judgment</h2>
<p>Another way to improve success as the first product manager is by using product judgment. Product judgment is the idea that you can use your own judgment to accurately predict what your customers need, want, and value and then design and ship the right solution for them.</p>
<h3>Recognizing product judgment</h3>
<p>Some ways to start applying product judgment are by seeing what other companies are doing. If a large company like Netflix is doing something, it’s likely that they have tested it numerous ways and could be an opportunity to copy them. Another example is if someone recommends you not to take a particular course of action and provides a few reasons why.</p>
<h3>How to build product judgment</h3>
<p>Some tips for building product judgment that Andrew provides include learning from others, playing with other products, trusting your gut, building empathy through exposure, and building the wrong thing to avoid building it twice.</p>
<h2>Being directionally correct</h2>
<p>Don’t expect to have super high accuracy or precision, but make sure that when you need to go right, you go right. Use user journeys as a prioritization tool. To do this, find a single theme, build the happy path and work with customer success for the rest. In the early stages, it’s essential to not look at where you want to go but to compare down to the baseline and see if you’re improving.</p>
<p>The key takeaways from this talk are to focus on learning not earning, cultivate your product judgment, be directionally correct, compare down, and find good founders teams and problems when starting out as the first product manager.</p>
<h2>Enjoy more ProductTank content</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/producttank-about/content/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ProductTanks</a> are informal meetups, created by Mind the Product, to bring local product people together and to enable speakers to share amazing product insights. Today we have ProductTanks in more than 200 cities across the globe and there’s probably one near you.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/producttank/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Learn more about ProductTank – find your local meetup, explore more ProductTank content, see the latest ProductTank news, and discover ways to get involved!</a></p>

core/freeform

Product Management Process

How to F.A.I.L. better in product by Marc Abraham

Fighting product-market drift by Dave Wascha

Building a digital product organisation, brick by brick by Nils Michaelis

Learnings from London: Going from Meh to Awesome by Shiva Rajaraman

The art of product management with Ken Norton

Using principles to make better decisions faster by Martin Eriksson

Rethinking delivery with product operations in the age of product

What’s stopping teams from running experiments by Cameron Savage

Top 7 signs you’re in a bad product system by Scott Williamson

How to bring product thinking to any team by Merissa Silk

The role of the first product manager by Andrew Moll

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