"“What does a product manager do, anyway?”"

"I was supposed to own the what and the why"

"I should be a visionary, the voice of the customer, Mr. get shit done, etc."

"I’m currently at Shopify in my third role in product, and again I find myself rethinking assumptions about what it is I truly do."

"It’s also forced me to figure out what shouldn’t change, and in doing so, push me to abstract away the what in favour of the why."

"It’s about why product management exists."

"Product Management is the by-product of two exponential forces being exerted on a company."

"Speed: The company exists in an industry where the rate of technological innovation is accelerating"

"Scale: Growth in the company’s product, organization, and customers are creating complexity"

"speed has two meanings: both how quickly you can get something to market with software development, and (critically) how competition forces companies to go faster to survive."

"But as the company grows, complexity emerges as more features are added, customers become more diverse, and the team grows"

"When you consider the simultaneous impacts of speed and scale on a company, it’s easy to conceptualize how things will eventually derail without someone thinking holistically about the company. Ultimately, that role is for the CEO, but when they’ve reached their multi-tasking limits, who else can fill the void?"

"The core competency of a product manager is truly understanding product development. That is, how to identify which problem to solve and how to work with a team to solve it."

"Product managers shepherd this system from problem identification through to product launch, ensuring that each node in the network is aware of the progression of the others, and that users increasingly want what is being developed."

"I view modern product development as a system of interconnected disciplines, working in a network, to deliver on a user’s desire. Product managers are the API that facilitates communication in this network."

"“Great product people understand how a change in the way the world works will impact the log files. And they can perceive that impact in real time.”"

"Teams need critical decisions made on a daily basis in order to maintain speed, and those decisions have major trade offs and/or conflicting interests among stakeholders."

"Shipping is a Feature is a core principle for product managers."

"It proposes that you’ll never be able to build a perfect product, so you need to learn how and when to ship your imperfect one, because customer use of the product is what really matters."

"The Time Value of Shipping is a framework to apply that principle."

"One dollar today is worth more than one dollar tomorrow."

"The reason is because prices rise with inflation over time, meaning your dollar will buy less stuff in the future."

"Buying the basketball is when you ship to your customers, usually your MVP"

"The price of the basketball is your users’ expectations of the product (at any given point in time)"

"You earn the sum of customer value that your team builds over time"

"Your job is to build enough value over time to afford the basketball."

"As with the time value of money, the time value of shipping is a simple idea: delivering customer value now is worth more than delivering value later."

"If you choose to deliver value later, you need to account for inflation in user expectations, and your eventual product needs to be much better to compensate."

"The differences in the trajectories of the customer expectation and value curves are clearly visible. The former grows exponentially over time, and the latter plateaus."

"Customer expectation growth accelerates because the longer a customer has to wait for their problem to be solved, the more time they have to switch to a substitute product."

"The scope of a minimum viable product grows the longer it takes to ship."

"First, as in the example above, there may only be one point in time (the tangent) where you can ship and satisfy users."

"This “gap of doom” is what underpins most product pivots, as companies realize they cannot innovate at the pace of that particular industry and move to where customer expectations are more attainable."

"Finally, you shouldn’t always ship an MVP (i.e. shouldn’t always ship at the first intersection of the curves)."

"This is counter intuitive to the gospel of MVP, but the time value of shipping suggests that sometimes holding off on a launch (even when it meets expectations) is the optimal thing to do."

"This is accentuated by the network effects that come with launches, which have diminishing returns after the initial marketing push."

"The best products don’t just satisfy customer needs, they reap the rewards of virality that come with delighting users."

"A manager’s output = output of their team + output of the surrounding teams that they influence"

"Managerial leverage is the idea that some things a manager does creates more output than others, and for each possible thing, the amount of output created per unit of time is its leverage. That’s the basis of how you should decide whether to do activity A or activity B."

"First Principles of PM Leverage"

"1. Any individual on my team knows how their work directly contributes to achieving the company’s vision. [Vision]"

"2. Any individual on my team can explain the rationale behind why we’re approaching the goal the way we are [Strategy]"

"Vision is used to describe the end state of your team’s efforts. Its primary importance is to provide the organization a succinct understanding of what a team cares about. It represents the heart, the raison d’etre, of that team."

"Make sure your vision fits into the company’s."

"At Shopify, we call this staying on the green path."

"Strategy describes the chosen approach towards achieving the vision. Its primary importance is to intersect the goals of the vision and the realities of the world into a gameplan for action."

"A strategy is not a roadmap. Roadmaps should be an output of strategy, and good ones will always clearly tie back to one."

"Real strategy answers what we’re building and why, who we’re going to target and why, how we’re going to grow and why, and how the end result will put the company into a better competitive position relative to alternatives. And why."

"The final benefit of operating under this framework is that it enables a product manager’s impact to scale more efficiently as they grow in a company."

"To combat this, you shouldn’t rely on one or even a few mental models, you should instead be continuously building a latticework of mental models that you can draw from to make better decisions."

"the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form."

"You’ve got to have models in your head. And you’ve got to array your experience — both vicarious and direct — on this latticework of models."

"the first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models — because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you’ll think it does."

"1. Return on Investment"

"The resources available to a product team are time, money, and [the number and skill of] people. When you’re comparing possible projects you could take on, you should always choose the one that maximizes impact to customers for every unit of resources you have."

"2. Time value of shipping"

"Product shipped earlier is worth more to customers than product shipped at a later time."

"to make good investment decisions, you also have to consider how quickly those features will ship, and place more value on features that will ship faster."

"3. Time Horizon"

"Choosing to ask “How can we create the most impact in the next 3 months?” or “How can we create the most impact in the next 3 years?” will result in dramatically different decisions for your team."

"4. Expected Value"

"all decisions create probabilities of multiple future outcomes. The probability-weighted sum of these outcomes is the expected value of a decision."

"Once you lay out all the outcomes, do a probability-weighted sum of the value of the outcomes and you’ll have a better picture on the return you will get on the investment."

"5. Working Backwards (Inversion)"

"Instead of starting at a problem and then exploring towards a solution, start at a perfect solution and work backwards to today in order to figure out where to start."

"Most teams tend to work forwards, which optimizes for what is practical at the cost of what’s ultimately impactful."

"6. Confidence determines Speed vs. Quality"

"The confidence you have in i) the importance of the problem your solving, and ii) the correctness of the solution you’re building, should determine how much you’re willing to trade off speed and quality in a product build."

"On the right side: you have confidence (validated through customers) that the problem you’re focused on is really important to customers, and you know exactly what to build to solve it."

"In that case, you shouldn’t take any shortcuts because you know customers will need this important feature forever, so it better be really high quality"

"Now let’s look at the left side: you haven’t even validated that the problem is important to customers."

"In this scenario, the longer you invest in building, the more you risk creating something for a problem that doesn’t even exist. Therefore, you should err on launching something fast and getting customer validation that it’s worth actually building out well."

"7. Solve the Whole Customer Experience"

"Creating great distress experiences, in particular, are amazing opportunities to earn long term customer trust."

"8. Experiment, Feature, Platform"

"Each have their own goal and optimal way to trade-off speed and quality."

"By recognizing the type of product development your project is, you will define more appropriate goals for each type, and you will right-size the speed and quality trade off that you make."

"Experiments are meant to output learning, so that you can invest in new features or platforms with customer validation."

"In contrast to experiments, platforms are forever. Other people will build features on top of them, and as such making changes to the platform after it’s live is extremely disruptive."

"platform projects need to be very high quality (stability, performance, scalability, etc.) and they need to actually enable useful features to be built."

"9. Feedback Loops"

"Cause and effect in products are the result of systems connected by positive and negative feedback loops."

"Feedback loops help us remember that some of the biggest drivers of growth or decline for a product may be from other parts of the system."

"10. Flywheel (recursive feedback loop)"

"A state where a positive or negative feedback loop is feeding on itself and accelerating from it’s own momentum"

"The flywheel is the phenomenon where more app users attract more app developers (because there is more opportunity to sell), which in turn attract more app users (because there are more apps to buy), which in turn attract more app developers, and so on."

"As long as you nurture the flywheel, not only will you grow, but you’ll grow at an accelerating rate."

"11. Diminishing Returns"

"When you focus on improving the same product area, the amount of customer value created over time will diminish for every unit of effort."

"Assuming you are effectively iterating the product based on customer feedback and research, you will eventually hit a point where there’s just not that much you can do to make it better. It’s time for your team to move on and invest in something new."

"12. Local Maxima"

"the local maxima is the point where incremental improvements creates no customer value at all, forcing you to make a step change in product capabilities."

"This mental model is tightly related to diminishing returns, with the addition of hitting a limit where it literally makes no material difference to keep improving something."

"Iteration now serves no purpose, and and the only way to progress is to innovate."

"13. Version two is a lie"

"When building a product, don’t bank on a second version ever shipping. Make sure the first version is a complete product because it may be out there forever."

"14. Freeroll"

"To hedge against these scenarios, make sure that whatever you ship is a “complete product” which, if it was never improved again, would still be useful to customers for the foreseeable future."

"A situation where there is little to lose and lots of gain by shipping something fast."

"Freerolls typically emerge in product when the current user experience is so bad that by making any reasonable change based on intuition is likely to make it much better."

"They are different than fixing bugs because bugs refer to something that’s not working as designed."

"15. Most value is created after version one"

"You will learn the most about the customer after you launch the product, don’t waste the opportunity to build on those learnings."

"As a percentage of customer insight learned, you will gain the majority of learning after launch. To not investing accordingly by iterating the product (sometimes drastically), doesn’t make sense with that in mind."

"16. Key Failure Indicator (KFI)"

"Pairing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with metrics you don’t want to see go in a certain direction, to ensure you’re focused on healthy growth."

"KFIs keep your team’s performance in check, and make sure that you only create net-healthy outputs for the company."

"Mental models are simple expressions of complex processes or relationships."