Product Philosophy

Product leadership can be boiled down to ensuring everyone from the product, engineering, and design teams are pushing in the same direction. An often overlooked tool for achieving unity and alignment is a product philosophy which is a cohesive set of principles and values that identifies the kinds of trade-offs that product managers on a team should make. It’s a tool that provides guidance in unclear and ambiguous situations.

A few notes before I share my product philosophy.

1. There is no such thing as a “universally right” or “universally wrong” set of values.

   • Product maturity and business goals will shape these values.

2. I use my product philosophy as a baseline. When I enter a new organization or team I can make adjustments to unlock more value based on the organization's priorities and needs.

Product Philosophy

1. Product value comes from solving the customer’s pain.

   • Blue ocean ideation often fails when it isn’t centered around a problem and building a product with state-of-the-art technology doesn’t mean customers will buy your product.

2. Focus on making one customer very successful rather than many customers moderately successful.

   • I’m a proponent of product organizations that focus on the depth of a solution, rather than the breadth of the solution.

   • Customer fit is more important than short-term revenue.

3. Do not ship without qualitative feedback loops.

   • Speaking with customers leads to thoughtful experiments with even more thoughtful hypotheses needing validation.

5 “P’s” of my Product Philosophy:

People: I believe that Product Management works in the service of the people and teams actually building the product.

Persuasion: Product managers are in the business of leading with influence and not authority. In order to do so, we need to build deep relationships and trust with all stakeholders.

Problem: Love the problem, not your solution. This phrase is borrowed from Ash Maurya and to me means that product managers are fundamentally problem managers responsible for curating the most important problems to solve.

Purpose: Product managers are the nucleus of an organization. Thus, we are the living embodiment of the organization’s purpose and vision.

Prioritize: Prioritize based on the organization’s vision. Prioritize to learn, not to be right.

The overarching theme of my product philosophy is customer centricity. In companies that I’ve built and in companies I’ve worked in, I have created a culture of product management that calls for intimate collaboration between sales, customer success, product, engineering, and data science teams. The insights gained by everyone in the organization are extremely valuable to people building the product.

Coming Q4 2024

I am building and will be sharing my product playbook in Q4 2024. It will be a collection of the knowledge, frameworks, and lessons I’ve learned throughout my product and business career. It will include my learnings and resources on the following topics:

• Leadership

  • Strategy Mapping

• Product Management

  • Customer Discovery and Human-Centered Design

  • Business Strategy

  • Product Planning Processes