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Mind the Product

Product Management

The executive product leader persona

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Andres is a freelance writer and digital marketer with a background in engineering and a keen interest in the latest technology advancements. He currently helps tech companies and startups tell their stories by turning their complex ideas into easy to understand material. You can reach out to him on LinkedIn

Andres Phillips

<p>The journey of going from 0 to 1 and finding product/market fit is a hard one, but it is the most romanticized by product managers. Often forgotten is the journey from 1 to 10 and what to do after you’ve already found <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/a-guide-to-product-market-fit/">product/market fit</a></span>. In this <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/mtpcon/london/">#mtpcon London+EMEA</a></span> session, Yuhki Yamashita, VP of Product at Figma, provides some practical tips that product managers can use to achieve this.</p>
<p>Watch the video to see his talk in full or read on for an overview of his key points:</p>
<ul>
<li>Don’t settle for 1 to 2</li>
<li>How do you decide which feedback is important?</li>
<li>How to get good ideas built</li>
<li>How do you say no?</li>
</ul>
<h2>Don’t settle for 1 to 2</h2>
<p>Yuhki recaps some of the companies he has worked for in his career, including Hotmail, Microsoft, YouTube, Uber, and currently Figma. At each of these companies, they wanted to take something they had been doing well and scale it exponentially. For example, <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/05/youtube-unplugged-online-streaming-cable-service">YouTube aimed to disrupt cable</a></span>, Uber to become the logistics platform for cities, and Figma to make design accessible to everyone.</p>
<p>For product managers at companies where business is going well, the product is loved by many, they’re bursting at the seams a little, and whose users want more, these tips would be helpful.</p>
<h2>How do you decide which feedback is important?</h2>
<p>Product managers need to decide which ideas and features to build and when to say no when dealing with customer feedback. The simplest way is if it’s important, you should build it. If not, you should say no. Most product managers may use a formula such as (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort to know which feedback to act on. However, Yuhki provides some practical tips:</p>
<h3>Tip 1: Seek out the feedback that’s unheard</h3>
<p>When working at Uber, it took seven steps for a driver or rider to send feedback via the app, making it difficult for a user to send feedback to the product team. This is true for many products as for every piece of feedback a user provides, a hundred more are never shared. To solve this problem, Yuhki and his team found that by conducting user interviews via driver lunches and ride-alongs, they could discover that many users shared similar problems.</p>
<h4>Tip 2: Pay special attention to user’s product hacks</h4>
<p>Sometimes product teams don’t have the time to develop every new feature request due to priority. But by paying attention to the product hacks that users come up with, they can find out which features should be prioritized. However, some of these hacks may be part of the culture of the product and should not be fixed.</p>
<h3>Tip 3: Translate feature requests to problems</h3>
<p>Feature requests given to product managers may be the initial way to solve a particular user problem but may not be the best way. Instead, work backward to understand the problem so that you can come up with the best solution.</p>
<h3>Tip 4: User feedback isn’t the only input</h3>
<p>Customer insights such as existing user needs and behaviors, business insights such as revenue opportunities and cost drivers, and macro environment insights such as industry trends and competition can be valuable sources of feedback.</p>
<h3>Tip 5: Code isn’t only way to build</h3>
<p>Product managers and developers often consider coding as the main resource for building a product. However, ops are also tools for building. For example, Yuhki recaps how the ops team at Uber used SQL queries and emails to build the product, recruit drivers and expand the user base.</p>
<h3>Tip 6: Users can build for you</h3>
<p>With software products, you can call on the help of your users to create plug-ins and applications that extend the functionality of the product and develop features the product team hasn’t had a chance to get to, something which Yuhki noticed happened at Figma.</p>
<h3>Tip 7: Competitors can build for you</h3>
<p>Competition can make everyone better when building products. Just as Uber leveraged competition with Lyft to inspire them to create new features and solve user problems, product managers can do the same with other competitors.</p>
<h3>Tip 8: Don’t be afraid to share your process</h3>
<p>Users don’t want to be treated as a statistic, but they also shouldn’t all be treated as kings where every feature they suggest needs to be implemented. There should be equality between these two extremes. When users ask for new features, product managers can let them know why it isn’t a priority by sharing some of the other priorities and frameworks they’re working on instead.</p>
<p>The key takeaways from this talk are that building trust with your customers by following these tips can help you decide better which feedback to consider first.</p>
<h2>Explore more #mtpcon content</h2>
<p>Mind the Product runs flagship conferences in San Francisco, Singapore, and London (#mtpcon) attracting thousands of attendees each from all over the world. We offer hybrid conferences too – enabling even more people in the community to get involved. <a href="https://mtpdevwpe.wpengine.com/tag/mtpcon/">Check out more #mtpcon content</a>.</p>
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core/freeform

Product/Market Fit

Deciding what to build after achieving product/market fit by Yuhki Yamashita

Operational excellence – product operations by Christine Itwaru

Prioritised Fireside Chat: Make better product decisions with JTBD

Changing direction whilst growing into uncertainty by Sam Reader

How to find product market fit by Harpal Singh

What is product/market fit? By Janna Bastow

Nailing Product/Market Fit by Chris Barton

Managing Products at Scale by Lindsay Rothman

Nailing Product/Market Fit by Alan Chiu

Mastering the Problem Space for Product/Market Fit by Dan Olsen

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