Tag: leadership

I’ve been in product leadership long before the term ‘Product Management’ became a common buzzword. Over the past eight years, I’ve held various titles with ‘Product’ in them, and yet, every day brings new lessons and insights. As I approach 2025, I’ve realized the importance of grounding myself in the principles that have guided me so far. This list serves as a personal reminder—a collection of foundations I’ve built upon, shaped by insights from books like Crucial Conversations, INSPIRED, The E-Myth Revisited, and The Mom Test.

I. Foundational Principles

1. Embrace the Product Mindset: Product management is not just a job; it’s a mindset ¹. It requires a passion for solving customer problems and a commitment to continuous improvement.
2. Deep Customer Knowledge: Become an undisputed expert on your customers². This involves understanding their needs, pain points, and desires through both qualitative and quantitative data³.
3. Data-Driven Decisions: Be comfortable with data and analytics⁴. Use data to understand how customers are using your products, analyze A/B test results, and inform product decisions.
4. Master the Product: Be an expert on your actual product and your industry. Share your knowledge openly and generously.
5. Continuous Learning: Stay intellectually curious and quickly apply new technologies to solve problems for customers⁵.

II. Team Dynamics & Collaboration

6. Build Strong Product Teams: Focus on building and nurturing strong, collaborative relationships with your product team. A product team typically includes a product manager, a product designer, and engineers.
7. Empowered Teams: Champion empowered product teams that are equipped to solve business problems. Ensure your team understands the company vision and how their work contributes to the larger purpose⁶.
8. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work effectively with product designers, engineers, and product marketing managers. Ensure product marketing is embedded with the product team⁷.
9. Effective Communication: Communicate product learnings clearly and consistently. Keep stakeholders informed and engaged⁸.
10. Delivery Management: Recognize the importance of delivery managers in removing obstacles for the team. Their work ensures that the team can focus on building valuable products⁹.

III. Strategic Product Development

11. Product Vision: Develop a compelling and inspiring product vision¹⁰. Use it to articulate your purpose and inspire the team¹¹.
12. Product Strategy: Define a clear product strategy that serves as a path to achieving the product vision. Ensure alignment between the product strategy and overall business strategy¹².
13. Product Principles: Complement your product vision and strategy with a set of guiding principles that define the nature of the products you want to create¹³.
14. Outcome-Focused Roadmaps: Shift from output-based roadmaps to those focused on business outcomes¹⁴. Ensure every roadmap item is tied to a specific business objective.
15. Embrace Discovery: Prioritize product discovery, which involves collaboration between product management, UX design, and engineering. Tackle risks before writing any code.
16. Prioritize Ruthlessly: Focus on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one¹⁵.
17. Problem-First Approach: Focus on solving the underlying problem. Don’t get caught up in the solution before you’ve fully understood the problem¹⁶.
18. Customer Discovery Programs: Use customer discovery programs to ensure that you’re building a product that customers love.

IV. Product Discovery and Delivery

19. Master Discovery Techniques: Utilize various discovery techniques to understand customer needs and validate ideas. This includes opportunity assessment, customer letters, and startup canvases.
20. Rapid Experimentation: Use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments¹⁷. Test ideas with users, customers, engineers, and business stakeholders in hours and days, not weeks and months¹⁸.
21. Usability Testing: Conduct regular usability tests to identify friction points in prototypes. Use these tests to learn about how customers use your products¹⁹.
22. Continuous Delivery: Strive for frequent release cycles to ensure teams move quickly and release with confidence.
23. Iterative Approach: Understand that it typically takes several iterations to get the execution of an idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value²⁰.

V. Leadership & Growth

24. Product Evangelism: Become an effective evangelist for your product. Inspire your team, stakeholders, and customers by “selling the dream”. Use prototypes to communicate the product vision²¹.
25. Adaptability: Be prepared to adapt to changes in the market and new trends²². Be flexible with the details, but remain stubborn on the overall vision.

Conclusion

Product management in 2025 will demand a combination of deep technical knowledge, strategic thinking, and a genuine passion for solving customer problems. By focusing on these 25 areas, product managers can position themselves for success and contribute to the creation of truly impactful products. It’s not about having all the answers, but about asking the right questions and embracing a continuous learning mindset.

1. “The art of Product Management is the art of life itself. Surround your-selves by great people, focus on your mojo, build great stuff with integrity, hold strong opinions but lightly. And Marty is one of the best teachers of this art.” —Punit Soni, Founder and CEO, Robin, Former Google APM ↩︎
2. “you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
3. “Without this deep customer knowledge, you’re just guessing. This requires both qualitative learning (to understand why our users and customers behave the way they do), and quantitative learning (to understand what they are doing)” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
4. “… product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They are expected to have both quantitative skills as well as qualitative skills. The Internet enables unprecedented volume and timeliness of data.
   A big part of knowing your customer is understanding what they’re doing with your product. Most product managers start their day with half an hour or so in the analytics tools, understanding what’s been happening in the past 24 hours. They’re looking at sales analytics and usage analytics. They’re looking at the results of A/B tests.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
5. Be “intellec-tually curious, quickly learning and applying new technologies to solve problems for customers, to reach new audiences, or to enable new business models.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
6. “The product teams need to have the necessary business context. They need to have a solid understanding of where the company is heading, and they need to know how their particular team is supposed to contribute to the larger purpose.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
7. “… because that’s where they are connected to the experience that the customer is having an opportunity to engage with.” —INSPIRED, Martina Lauchengco ↩︎
8. “Evangelize continuously and relentlessly. There is no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to explaining and selling the vision. Especially in larger organizations, there is sim-ply no escaping the need for near-constant evangelization. You’ll find that people in all corners of the company will at random times get nervous or scared about something they see or hear. Quickly reassure them before their fear infects others.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
9. “In growth-stage and enterprise companies, many product managers complain that they have to spend far too much of their time doing project management activities. As a result, they have almost no time to address their primary product responsibility: ensuring that the engineers have a product worth building.
   Delivery managers are a special type of project manager whose mission is all about removing obstacles—also known as impediments—for the team. Sometimes, these obstacles involve other product teams, and sometimes they involve non-product functions. In a single day, they might track down someone in marketing and press them for a decision or an approval, coordinate with the delivery manager on another team about prioritizing a key dependency, persuade a product designer to create some visual assets for one of the front-end developers, and deal with a dozen other similar roadblocks.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
10. “The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. For hardware or device-centric companies, it’s usually five to 10 years out.
    Note that this is not the same as the company mission statement. Examples of mission statements are “organize the world’s information” or “make the world more open and connected” or “enable anyone any-where to buy anything anytime.” Mission statements are useful, but they don’t say anything about how we plan on accomplishing that. That’s what the product vision is for.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
11. “Start with why. This is coincidentally the name of a great book on the value of product vision by Simon Sinek. The central notion here is to use the product vision to articulate your purpose. Everything follows from that.
    Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. I hope you’ve heard this before, as it’s been said many times, in many ways, by many people. But it’s very true and something a great many product people struggle with.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
12. “Communicate the strategy across the organization. This is part of evangelizing the vision. It’s important that all key business partners in the company know the customers we’re focused on now and which are planned for later. Stay especially closely synced with sales, marketing, finance, and service.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
13. “Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
14. … focus “on outcome and not output. Realize that typical product roadmaps are all about output. Yet, good teams are asked to deliver business results.
    Most of the product world has the same definition for product roadmap, but there are a few variations. I define product roadmap as a prioritized list of features and projects your team has been asked to work on. These product roadmaps are usually done on a quarterly basis, but sometimes they are a rolling three months, and some companies do annual roadmaps.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
15. “Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.” —The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick ↩︎
16. “This is another reason why typical product roadmaps are so problematic. They’re lists of features and projects where each feature or project is a possible solution. Somebody believes that feature will solve the problem or it wouldn’t be on the roadmap, but it’s all too possible they are wrong. It’s not their fault—there’s just no way to know at the stage it’s put on the roadmap.
    However, there very likely is a legitimate problem behind that potential solution, and it’s our job in the product organization to tease out the underlying problem and ensure that whatever solution we deliver solves that underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
17. “… use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments in product discovery, and then in delivery, we build and release products in hopes of achieving product/market fit, which is a key step on the way to delivering on the company’s product vision.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
18. “If we can prototype and test ideas with users, customers, engi-neers, and business stakeholders in hours and days—rather than in weeks and months—it changes the dynamics, and most important, the results.
    It’s worth pointing out that it isn’t the list of ideas on the roadmap that’s the problem. If it was just ideas, there’s not much harm in that. The issue is that anytime you put a list of ideas on a document entitled “roadmap,” no matter how many disclaimers you put on it, people across the company will interpret the items as a commitment. And that’s the crux of the problem, because now you’re committed to build-ing and delivering this thing, even when it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
19. “You will need to define in advance the set of tasks that you want to test. Usually, these are fairly obvious. If, for example, you’re building an alarm clock app for a mobile device, your users will need to do things like set an alarm, find and hit the snooze button, and so on. There may also be more obscure tasks, but concentrate on the primary tasks—the ones that users will do most of the time.
    Some people still believe that the product manager and the prod-uct designer are too close to the product to do this type of testing objectively, and they may either get their feelings hurt or only hear what they want to hear. We get past this obstacle in two ways. First, we train the product managers and designers on how to conduct themselves, and second, we make sure the test happens quickly—before they fall in love with their own ideas. Good prod-uct managers know they will get the product wrong initially and that nobody gets it right the first time. They know that learning from these tests is the fastest path to a successful product.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
20. “…even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, it typically takes several itera-tions to get the execution of this idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value that management was hoping for. This is often referred to as time to money” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan  ↩︎
21. “The product vision needs to inspire. Remember that we need product teams of missionaries, not mercenaries. More than anything else, it is the product vision that will inspire missionary-like passion in the organization. Create something you can get excited about. You can make any product vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
22. “Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends. Too many companies ignore important trends for far too long. It is not very hard to identify the important trends. What’s hard is to help the organization understand how those trends can be leveraged by your products to solve customer problems in new and better ways.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎