People first approach to product management
Summary of How to Solve People’s Problems as a product manager by a Facebook Product Manager
Aiaerim Shorman in 2017 shared in a Product School Bay area meetup how changing one word in product development makes a tremendous difference in her PM job. The language from solving customer’s problem to solving people’s problem – a person who at the end using the product, makes it more personally vs being a customer with some sort of currency transaction.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants?
Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas.That m.o. is doubly dangerous, it doesn’t merely yield few good ideas. It yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them – Paul Graham
She shared the following steps to building a People’s product in Facebook where she currently leads the Profile Expression team.
Step 1: Research
- In a big company or a well funded company with existing product, look at how customers are using your product today
- You don’t need to conduct 100s of customer interviews. After 7-9 interviews across your customer base, you will pretty much hear the same customer patterns.
- Try to understand what is happening
Step 2: Data
- How big is this
Look at something people are trying to do and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck – Paul Graham
Step 3: Pain points
- Identify current pain points
- Brainstorm ideas
Step 4: MVP (4 weeks to public test)
- Small test using a few partners/suppliers/customers/region
- Address the main pain points
- Test and see quickly whether it will work or not
- Get feedback
Step 5: Get Version 1 of the product
- Take the next 3 priority 1 backlog items to build
- Get more feedback
Step 6: Fully scaled product
- Iterate and scale
