My Product Philosophy

We are all products of various influences in life. My philosophy is also a product of multiple influences from varied authors and product leaders I have read and interacted with in my life.

I would like to write my philosophy in a style inspired by the lyrics of Frankie Laine, in his song, I Believe.

On Building Products

• I believe in building products that make the world a better place. I use Nir Eyal’s Manipulation Matrix to stay the course.
• I believe that your product is not “the product”. Your business model is “the product”. — Inspired by Ash Maurya.

Closely related to this is also the concept of Whole Product Model that I am keenly focussed about, which increases possibility of mainstream market success.

• I believe in being revenue-driven with my product decisions. I believe revenues are the truest validation of delivering value to your customers. When a customer parts away his money to buy your product, you know you have delivered real value.
• I believe in building for outcomes, not outputs. I don’t measure success with the number of features shipped but the extent of impact it has had on customers.
• I believe in striving for building less, and yet delivering more impact. For this, I need to learn to be ruthless in prioritization.
• I believe launching products or features is not success. I would never celebrate a product launch. Success is when customers validate its value through positive feedback.
• I strongly believe in the Lean Startup and Agile principles of product development.

On Customer Immersion

• I believe that I am first and foremost a customer advocate. I strive to provide value to my customers with what I build for them.
• I believe that I must strive to understand my customers better than anyone else in my organization.
• I believe in building products in collaboration with customers as close development partners. I follow Steve Blank’s Customer Developmentprinciples.
• I believe in investing atleast 20% of my time with customers if not more. 80% of the value I bring to work comes from the investment of this 20% of my time.

On Being Data and Metric Driven

• I believe in being data-aware instead of being data-driven.

On the Nature of my Role

• I believe my primary identity is of being a value creator for my product. I strive to make my product more valuable to the market than it currently is.
• I believe in investing in product discovery efforts than anything else. Product development and implementation though is very important, comes only next to right product discovery.
• I believe I am responsible for simplifying complex information and building shared understanding for the teams.

• I believe communication both written and verbal are important elements of my role and I must continuously strive to improve upon it.

On Structures and Alignment

• I believe in striving for alignment from vision to execution for my products. This includes mastering stakeholder communication and reviews.

On Attitudes and Mindset

• I believe in inculcating a mindset of deep empathy for my customers.
• I believe in loving the problem and not the solution. And that is why I am a big believer of the Jobs to be Done framework.
• I believe in mistrusting my opinions and building tentatively by identifying and testing right hypothesis through experiments.
• I believe in staying humble and always be prepared to be proven wrong with my decisions.
• I believe in being conscious of not falling into the trap of confirmation bias. The default position is to find evidence for invalidating my own assumptions and hypothesis.
• I believe in practicing 10X moonshot thinking. Product managers need to be bold visionaries. I do not want to limit myself to features and functions but stretch my imagination to a big, hairy audacious future. — Inspired by Ken Norton
• I believe in inculcating a Craftsman mindset in product management. I dedicate my life towards mastering my PM skills.