This is my first post on Medium. I’ve been thinking about writing for a while, but like most people, I never got around to it (too busy watching Netflix). But earlier this week, I was struck with an urge to write as part of a larger career move (more on that in a bit). I’m a product manager by trade and throughout my career, I’ve experienced the ups and downs of startups and big companies and know that there can be things from my experience that might help people wanting some advice on product management or getting into the field for the first time. The larger plan is to use this experience to help others professionally, whether nurturing an idea to market or take an existing product to the next level. I hope to share more about my product development philosophy and best practices, but to start, here are a few product management tenets I live by:
- Empathy is the most important trait of a product manager
- A user’s experience is paramount to building delightful products
- Data should be used to guide decisions but is not the end all, be all
- Many things can be products
It’s this last tenet that hit me one morning this week. I believe anything with a user or customer experience can be a product — even a meal, a movie, a song, or a one’s personal brand. I was reading an ESPN article about Gregg Popovich, the legendary NBA head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, detailing his famous team dinners and the mystique around them. The article begins by chronicling a young general manager and wine director of a Sacramento restaurant Jeremy Threat, who on a hunch that the Spurs team would be dining at the establishment later that evening remembered reading about Coach Popovich’s love of wine and some of his favorites in an issue of Wine Spectator. The wine director then contacted his friend with an extensive wine collection to see if he had any, which he did, and the director purchased 120 bottles valued at $50,000 and built a wine list just for the coach in case he and the team were to drop by the restaurant. Popovich and the team did come to dinner at Threat’s restaurant, and the coach was floored by the preparation when he found out. He promptly bought 20 bottles, 10 for dinner and 10 to-go. What I was so impressed by was Threat’s superhuman foresight and intense passion for the customer to provide an amazing customer experience. His “product” was the restaurant dining experience for Coach Popovich. The “features” were the food, the ambiance, and the killer feature and key differentiator was Threat’s perfect execution to create a delightful wine experience for Coach, one that ended up being very memorable and beneficial to Threat’s career (he would later work with Thomas Keller of French Laundry fame in part because of this story).
Some product management takeaways from this anecdote:
- Listen to your gut — This is a consequence of experience and understanding all the potential use cases or corner cases that can occur. Threat knew the Spurs were in town and frequents similar restaurants. For you, it might be a market trend you listened to on a podcast, a passing comment a friend made about an app she uses, or hunch to go with one design over another (this doesn’t always work, but you should still have your gut advise you.)
- Know the customer — Threat knew Popovich loves wine and has genuine passion and mastery about wine. Similarly, the product manager should be the user’s advocate and anticipate his/her/their desires.
- Have the resources to execute a vision — Not everyone has a friend with a deep wine cellar but tapping into your network or knowing who to turn to should always be in a product manager’s tool kit.
- Keep up to date on the latest in your industry — if you’re a wine director, you should probably read Wine Spectator. If you’re a product manager, you should probably read about technology or posts from Product Hunt, Mind the Product, or Medium posts about product management ;)
- Go above and beyond to deliver the best customer experience — Putting everything together, Threat developed a tailored wine list for Popovich of his favorite wines ready for when the team dined at the restaurant. Your designers and engineers come together to build the right experience in your app, website, or whatever you set forth.
These takeaways add up to understanding your core competency and using it as a competitive advantage. Being a jack of all trades can only get you so far. Know what you or your company is best at and weave it into your product, and it will really shine through.
Oftentimes product managers can feel powerless in a company — we don’t really build anything, we don’t really design, we don’t really code, yet we’re responsible for the end product. We own the end user experience, and that is what Threat did and inspires me to do every day — a relentless commitment to building the best experience for the user.
This is a lot to pack into a first post, but I hope to touch upon these themes and more in future posts — insights about customer support, effective communication, crisis management, productive post mortems and many more scenarios that can help you in your situation. Many of these principles can be used in other areas and industries too — for me, it’s helped me deliver better feedback and become a better photographer (my side hustle, possible future Medium post!) Thanks for dropping by and talk to you again soon!
