PM Tips - #PMGoals
You may have heard about #LifeGoals and #RelationshipGoals well today I want to talk about #PMGoals. #PMGoals are skills you want to develop so that you can become a better Product Manager I’ll kick things off. My goal is to become more inquisitive and ask better questions so that I can get better answers. Why is this important? Asking questions can be the difference between building something that addresses your users needs and building something that only you find interesting. Also, the true answer to your question is often not provided by the first response from users. In fact, a lot of research has been performed on how many questions it takes to get to the root problem and 5 is often considered the magic number. The “5 Whys” technique was formally developed by Sakichi Toyoda and was used within the Toyota Motor Corporation during the evolution of its manufacturing methodologies.
The “5 Whys” are particularly important during user testing. When you ask users about their pain points with your product they may start out with a few feature suggestions. If you dig into the feature suggestions and ask questions about why they want those features and what problems they will solve, you may uncover new problems that have a variety of different solutions which may be different from the features they originally requested. Many PMs love the Steve Jobs quote, “A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Another popular quote is that of Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
I believe both of these quotes are true, but although people don’t usually know what they want, asking more questions can help to understand what problems they are facing and what jobs they are trying to accomplish. In Henry Ford’s quote for example, if you asked a user who rode horse and buggys what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. If you asked why they wanted faster horses, they may have provided more insight into why they need to go faster, how fast the user hopes to get to their destination, and why their current horses don’t go faster. These answers by no means would have provided you with the technical solution that Henry Ford developed. That’s where the PM magic comes in. You have to be able to take all of your user’s problems and come up with solutions that address their problems. Many of these solutions may not be what the user envisioned until you show it to them, as Jobs quoted.
Now you know why I’m working on building up my curiosity and why I encourage fellow PMs to do the same. What are your #PMGoals? Are there certain skills you hope to develop so that you can take your PM skills to the next level? Please share them with me via my contact information on the left of the page. In closing, I’ll leave you with a quote and a song.
Quote: “People think they need the answers. They don’t need the answers they need the right question.” - I heard Tim Ferriss mention this quote a mentor shared with him in one of his recent podcasts.
Song: Mos Def - The Questions