Is Product Management = Problem Solving?

Many folks stepping into product management are confident they'll thrive because they are good at solving problems. While that's a fantastic skill for PMs to build, there’s much more to the gig than that. A product manager is responsible to bring together people with diverse skills and create an environment where the team can solve the right problems, together. I think of the product lifecycle as a #flywheel, where each successful launch opens doors to uncover and tackle a new set of challenges.

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#1 Identify the problems

• What are the problems that customers are facing?
• What might be the hidden problems that customers aren’t aware of?
• What challenges are our competitors solving?
• What problems may arise down the road based on industry trends?

#2 Choose what to tackle first

• Which problems are truly worth solving ?
• Which problems are the most urgent/important for our customers?
• Which ideas will differentiate our product from competition?
• Which innovation has the potential to disrupt industry or create a new market?

#3 Evangelize to get buy-in

• Are all team members clued in on why this is a problem and what we're aiming to solve?
• Do they share the enthusiasm for our vision and the benefits we're promising?
• Is there a consensus among leadership and across teams to make this issue a priority? 

This is the stage at which PMs begin to solve a problem. But remember, a big part of product management is all finding the right problems to solve and eliminating or deferring the rest!

#4 Defining the right solution

• What are the different ways in which we could solve this problem?
• What is our MVP (minimum viable product solution) and what is our ultimate goal?
• What tradeoffs we are willing to make to get out MVP out the door and loved by users?
• What are the functional requirements, user experience, and technical design?

#5 Get customer feedback

• Are our users actually finding the proposed solution useful?
• Is the user’s experience intuitive?
• Is our technical design ready for scale?
• Are we missing or overlooking anything?

#6 Building the solution

• Do we have alignment across cross functional teams to build the solution?
• What are the constraints and timelines we are operating under?
• What are the challenges we will run into while executing on the plan?

#7 Launching the solution

• What's our game plan for the big reveal?
• How will we measure if it's a hit?
• Are our users raving about what we've built?

What new challenges are we gearing up to tackle next? The product lifecycle is flywheel where every launch opens doors to identify the next set of challenges to go after.

#productmanagement #problemsolving #customerobsession #teamwork