Kellogg PM: Week1 Overview of product management

overview of product management

This chapter introduce basic management component: vision, mission, strategy. Then dive into product perspective under the same hood, we will have product strategy and product roadmap. After that we move to overview of product myopia, basic idea of problem focus rather than feature or business focus.

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

Important learning

1. strategy drift — no alignment between business strategy and product strategy
2. over customization — this scenario happens when listening too much on customer feedback then tailored for everyone. That lead to unscalable.
3. product roadmap <> product strategy & product strategy <> product roadmap — However, product roadmap is outcome of product strategy
4. Product centric vs. Brand Centric(Consumer Product Goods/CPG) — I never have experience working in CPG business before, and I can’t think of how they’re doing business because I could feel like the value they’re offering to the customer is fairly the same. This understanding change my point of view, brand makes it different not the product.
5. Embedded product — In service company, they start to use PM to leverage current process and automate tedious process. This could strengthen their offering to their customer either B2C, B2B. Noted that we don’t directly sell the product, it works in the background or embedded in the service we provide.

“Not only you need to know the problem, but you also need to know problem context” — Prof Mohan

This make me better understand the difference of problem-solution fit vs. product-market fit. Problem solution fit happen in the state where you don’t know any context at all, your set of solution is fairly big. Once you try to understand more of the customer context, you see the reality out of your assumption. You will have chance to prove whether what you think is true or not, does customer really has this problem and do they prioritize it? This is major filter for your big set of your solution, after filtering new set is called “Product Market Fit”.

image from Strategyzer, link is down below

Survival Of The Fittest

Further reading from the course

1. Vision vs. Strategy by Marty Cagan, Silicon valley product group
2. Dealing with difficult stakeholders tips for product owner
3. Vision and Strategy is product management
4. Creative Strategy Generation Is Product Management
5. The Product Manager vs. The Strategist
6. Be a Great Product Leader, Adam Nash
7. What Do Product Managers Do, Product Arts
8. Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, Ben Horowitz, and David Weiden
9. What It Takes to Become a Great Product Manager, Julia Austin, Harvard Business Review