The truth is, getting a promotion is often a complicated game. Yes, your skills and achievements play a role, but so do other factors such as how much your manager cares about developing talents, how good and tenured your peers are, how political the company is, etc.

When the problem has already been well-defined and the solution has been agreed upon, your focus is to execute it really well.

“How can we ship this quickly?”
This is all about managing the backlog: Make sure the tickets are clearly written, rightly sized, correctly prioritized, and efficiently worked on.

Shipping quicker also means getting feedback from the users faster, i.e. reducing the risk of spending months building the wrong thing.

You might choose to roll out the feature incrementally or do an A/B test before rolling out the winning version.

— Prototype usability testing

What it does: Test whether the users know how to use your solution.
What it doesn’t: Test whether the users want to use your solution.

There are user journeys that you would want to improve until you’re sure you‘ve nailed them, such as the acquisition and activation journeys.

Critically evaluating a solution (“Is there a better way to solve this problem?”) and evaluating a problem (“Is this problem worth solving?”) are what take your product thinking to the next level. It might also mean saying no, or pushing back at your stakeholders.

As a PM, it’s your job to understand the strategic importance of the problem you’re building, which enables you to put the right constraints for the solution.

As a PM, you have to be able to articulate:

Which company objective are you trying to address by working on this?
What user problems are you tackling? (And my favourite follow-up question: How do you know that it’s a problem?)
How do you know if you’ve solved the problem? Which outcome metrics will be impacted? What output metrics will you be measuring and how will they influence the outcome metrics?

Now depending on how product-led the company is, questioning whether a problem is worth solving might not be easy. Product requests could come from very senior stakeholders, even the CEO, and the PM might need to pick their battle.

Let’s equip you with some tools that can help you do that.

— Quantifying impact

You can quantify impact by considering these factors, which then translated into dollar value:

Reach: the number of users impacted
Intensity: how painful the current state is for these users
User segment: how valuable the user segment is for your company (i.e. the reach could be minimum, but this handful of users might be bringing half of your revenue)

Understanding the true cost of a feature

It’s usually pretty straightforward to estimate how much is it going to cost you to build a feature. Take a time estimation from the engineers, and multiply it by their salary. But you have to remember that there are other types of costs, apart from the cost of building

The question is not always “Is this problem worth solving?” — it could also be “Why now?”

Some problems are like a fire — you either have to solve them now or rebuild later. Other problems are like a leaking roof — it gets worse and worse slowly until the whole roof falls down. Some other problems are like a puddle of water — it’s annoying but it doesn’t harm anyone as long as everyone knows to walk around it.

Jeff Bezos from Amazon popularized the concept of disagree and commit which I personally love.

Answering this question requires a deep understanding of why and how your users use your product, and the factors they consider when they switch to and away from your product.

The main tenet of JTBD is understanding what the user is trying to accomplish when they “hire” your product.

Understanding the deeper reason will enable you to identify improvement opportunities you could implement in your product to serve your user needs better.

There are four forces playing in somebody’s decision to switch:

Push factors: Pain points and dissatisfaction around the current solution
Pull factors: Advantages or benefits of the new solution
Anxiety: Concerns and worries about the new solution
Inertia: Comfort and familiarity with the existing solution

Radical innovation usually comes from looking outwards, not incremental improvement.

In mapping these alternatives and comparing them with your product, you can use customer needs as the other side of the axis and assess how well each product is satisfying the needs.

It’s also useful to do the complementary exercises: (1) Mapping your user segments, as each segment will have different needs, and not all segments are equally valuable to your business and (2) Mapping the needs into hygiene, performance, and delighters, aka The Kano Model.

How might we expand our product’s value chain?

try to map out the process that your customers go through to accomplish their JTBD. Is there a way you can expand your value by helping them in the process before or after they use your product?

If the cost of thinking is higher than the cost of building, just build and ship it. The market will tell you if you’re right.