Think like a product manager
- 1. Think Like a Product Manager
- 2. 2 Ibrahim Keji Fintech and Payment nerd with over 15 years experience in the Product management space. A startup advisor, Product management mentor and digital transformation expert.
- 3. Objectives Major take-home from the session will include: ⊚ Understanding the fundamental of Product Mindsets ⊚ Understanding the end goal for adopting the Product Mindsets 3
- 4. 4 “Uneasy Lies the head that wears the crown” A Product Manager role comes with heavy demand from internal and external stakeholders.
- 5. The Worry List of a Typical PM ⊚ User’s Pain Point ⊚ User Experience ⊚ Shipping Features ⊚ Competitive landscape ⊚ Team efficiency ⊚ Market Opportunities 5 ⊚ Systems and Processes ⊚ Revenue and Profitability ⊚ Fund raising ⊚ Growth ⊚ Many More
- 6. 6 Considering the heavy demand on Product Managers, success or failure is determined by employing the right mindsets to building products.
- 7. 7 Fundamental Mindsets of a PM Product Manager Exploration EvangelismImplementation Analysis
- 8. 8 Explorer’s Mindset Great Product Managers seeks push their products beyond the current frontiers of technology.
- 9. ⊚ Innovation is one of the most important factors in highly successful products. ⊚ PM have the guts and boldness to their the product team into uncharted waters. ⊚ The drive to try what no one has tried before to achieve a result no one has achieved yet. Goal Continuous innovation: Keep giving customers a better experience and more value Exploration 9
- 10. “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” – Henry Ford Innovation is meeting the needs people didn’t know they have until you show it to them. 10
- 11. 11 Analyst’s Mindset PMs can extract insights from numbers and trends then use them as premises for informed actions.
- 12. ⊚ Customer and Market understanding is key to successful products. ⊚ PM seeks to gain understanding from both internally (Product) and externally (Market) generated data. ⊚ Analyst thinks in numbers and makes sense of every digit. ⊚ Sometimes, the best insights are not quantitative in nature, rather they are qualitative. Goal Understanding and Informed decisions Analysis 12
- 13. “Analytics should change what you do, not just how you do it.” – Brian Balfour PM looks to analytics to get direction through a product lifecycle. 13
- 14. 14 Implementer’s Mindset The speed of execution is vital to the efficiency of a product teams.
- 15. ⊚ Execution is the PM’s super power. ⊚ Great product strategy often fail due to poor execution approach. ⊚ The execution mindset help PM think through the feasibility and materialization of their strategies and ideas. ⊚ Speedy execution changes the game in a fast moving market. Goal Speedy delivery of features and offering. Implementation 15
- 16. “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.” - Peter Drucker Execution require an high level of discipline which has to be ingrained into the culture of the product team. 16
- 17. 17 Evangelist’s Mindset PMs are strong believers in their products. They believe in what their products represent and are ashamed to share it with everyone that cares.
- 18. ⊚ Communicating the Product Vision and values to the stakeholders is the PMs prerogative. ⊚ PM seeks every opportunity to seed in the product vision in the minds of the product team, Management and Customers. ⊚ Product evangelism starts with the “Why”. Goal Keep team motivated and inspire customer loyalty Evangelism 18
- 19. “Evangelism is selling a dream” - Guy Kawasaki PMs hold their products as dear as a religion. The herculean task is passing this same faith to all stakeholders. 19