The Progressing Product Manager
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Tools & resources for Product Management
Tools and resources for Product Design
Ways to stay in the loop
Job hunting
Discovery/the problem
The problem space
As I mentioned earlier, product managers work to add value to users and the business. The problem space is where your user needs are. This could be the challenges/pain-points they face, their goals or their desires.
'Customers don’t care about your solution. They care about their problems’ - Dave McClure
It is a product manager's role to ensure the product allows users to overcome their problem or achieve a goal. However, people don’t often communicate what their problem is in a clear way. We often think of solutions because as users we don’t know any better (e.g. asking for a feature because they think it will help, rather than being clear why they want that feature. Product Managers must read between lines to define the problem space.
Product / Market fit
Getting the balance between adding value to users and adding value to the business is known as product / market fit.
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An image of the product market triangle. From Dan Olsen’s book. Resources section.
- Target Customer: Who are they?
- Underserved Needs: What are their needs?
- Value Proposition: How the customer benefits and how our product is better.
- Feature Set: The functionality that supports those benefits.
- User Experience (UX): What the customer interacts with to get the benefits
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