User-focus vs User-led
Product Management, UX, Startups, and more — freshly curated by Zeda.io
Hello, all you product-loving folks! 🥰
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Café, your weekly cup of coffee for everything product management, startups, and more. ☕
Why PMs should be user-focused and not user-led 🔍
I think it's safe to assume that we’ve all used iTunes at some point, but do you recall using it anytime recently? No, because Apple discontinued it. It was an app that crammed way too many features, to the point where it got so cluttered, both feature and design-wise. You can read more about this in detail in our previous newsletter.
That’s why an important skill that any Product Manager should possess irrespective of which industry they belong is knowing the difference between being user-focused and being user-led. Because if a PM were to listen and incorporate every single request that users wanted, every app they create would be like the next iTunes, just waiting to fail.
According to Martin Eriksson, the co-founder of Mind the Product, “Being user-focused means ignoring or even going against explicit user wishes in order to better serve the user.”
A great example of a company that’s not user-led would be 37signals, a famous computer software company, which ignores many of its users’ requests to add more features because the number one request they receive is asking them to keep the product simple. If the company were to grant every single one of its users’ requests, the product would get bloated, less user-friendly, and ultimately less likely to meet users’ needs.
Credit: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/be-user-centered-not-user-led/?ref=hackernoon.com
Tips to stay user-focused as a Product Manager 💡
While there are many tips to stay user-focused, here are the top 3 tips that are sure to work:
1. Being honest
Staying user-led means that you don’t have to ship out every feature that was requested. If a feature is likely to ruin your product’s unique selling point or cause many customers to leave, then you can confidently say no to such requests. Such decisions should be communicated to your users either through public roadmaps, slack groups, or in-app widgets which can be used to collect customer feedback and suggestions.
Some companies even go to the extent of helping customers understand why they’re not prioritizing their suggestions over other things. Being this open and transparent means your customers feel that they are being valued which in turn entices them to give better and useful feedback.
2. Define success in users’ words
Kristin Zibell, Director of Product Management at Akili Interactive Labs, talks about how at the beginning of any project she asks her team to define what success means in their user’s words. They create a success statement for each user persona which helps them establish a strong user-centered foundation at the start of a project that’s carried all the way through to reviews.
To review each design and build, Zibell then asks her team this one question “Can a user achieve this stated success from here?” The answer to this will tell you which pieces of information and actions are necessary—and which are irrelevant.
Credit: https://www.userzoom.com/blog/expert-opinions-on-user-centered-product-management/?ref=hackernoon.com
3. Shift the focus
The words that PMs use with their team, stakeholders, and customers dictate the focus of the conversation. When having product conversations outside of your team, try to avoid discussions around words like "code", "dependencies", "deployment", "roadmap", etc. These all focus on the actual work being done, and not the value you are delivering to the user.
Try to change the words you use to "value", "problem", "customer", "user", "experience", "journey", "workflow", etc. This will help you to change the focus of the conversation to the users' needs and perspectives.
When a customer requests a feature, PMs should ideally respond with something like "that's a great idea, how are you solving the [associated problem] right now?", or "we hadn't thought of that, what would [proposed solution] help you accomplish?"
These questions help the Product Manager get down to the root of the problem before deciding to add it to the backlog.
Credit: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/customer-focused-product-management-kooper-barton/?ref=hackernoon.com
We’ve covered a lot more tips on how to stay user-focused as a Product Manager here: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-stay-user-focused-as-a-product-manager
Good reads for extra credit 📚
Good Product Managers and Great Product Managers, a thread by Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi, a PM leader who has built products for Google, Twitter, and more talks about the difference between a good Product Manager and a great one in 30 neatly written Twitter threads.
Product Management Mental Models for Everyone by Brandon Chu
These are models that are accumulated over time by different individuals and help PMs make better and faster decisions.
In other news…Meta releases “Make a video” 🎥
Meta recently released a new AI technology that turns texts into high-quality video clips. With just a few words or lines of text, Make-A-Video can bring imagination to life and create one-of-a-kind videos full of vivid colors, characters, and landscapes. The system can also create videos from images or take existing videos and create new ones that are similar
Credit: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/generative-ai-text-to-video/
What’s brewing on Zeda.io’s side? ☕
Introducing ProductManager.Wiki!
We’ve carefully handpicked our favorite learning material, so all you curious folks who want to level up your product management game will have everything you need in one place. The best part? It’s completely free!
Check it out here: https://www.producthunt.com/products/productmanager-wiki
And oh, ProductManager.wiki is also the number 1 product of the day on Product Hunt! Woohoo! Stay tuned to know what’s more in store.
That’s all folks! Have something you want to share? Put them in the comments below and we’ll get back to you soon.
See you again next week! 🥂It’s hard to explain what a Product Manager does, we get it. But you know what’s not that hard? Sharing this newsletter with your friends and colleagues!
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|