Product Management

Take Ownership. By taking ownership of the initial failure, We built trust with our team and our manager. By being the first to admit our mistake, we encourage our teammates to take ownership as well.

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When we Take Ownership, we are open to:

• Being Humble

• Controlling Negative Emotions

• Building Relationships

02.

Prioritize and Execute. In your Product Management career, you will face a similar situation. There will be multiple things to work on, and you’ll feel overwhelmed. Which brings us to our second principle.

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When we Prioritize and Execute, we are open to:

• Focus

• Communicate Your Priorities

• Do Whatever it Takes (once you, your team, and your manager share the same priorities)

03.

Start with Why. The majority of disagreements happen when people are not aligned on the why. Aligning on the why can help you avoid:

• Building a product when your team doesn’t know why they’re building it

• Sharing data with executives when they don’t know why the data matters

• Arguing about a product design when no one knows why the product matters to the customer

• Always get aligned on the way early, it’s one of the best time investments that you can make

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By starting with the Why, we are open to:

• Obsess Over the Customer Problem

• Communicate Why Constantly

• Keep it Simple

04.

Find the Truth. When we get into disagreements with others, remember that our job as a product manager is to find the truth, not to be right all the time.

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Because people expect product managers to know everything about their product, we used to spend hours looking at customer research and crafting a polished document before sharing it with anyone. We would then go into a meeting with a goal to convince everyone else to see things our way. This approach is inefficient.

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It is inefficient because no matter how much preparation we do, there’s always a chance that we could be wrong. So instead of going into a discussion with a goal of “How can we convince this person to see things our way?” We now have a goal of “How can we discover the truth together?

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By finding the Truth, we are open to:

• Seek Knowledgeable People

• Balance Decision Quality with Decision Speed

• Disagree and Commit

05.

Be Radically Transparent. Many people have written books about radical transparency, but the best framework that we’ve found is from the book Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Kim recommends that you measure radical transparency on two axes: how often you care personally, and how often you challenge directly.

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By being Radically Transparent, we are open to:

• Care Personally

• Challenge Directly

• Empower Others