Product Management Resources
This page will include all the tools and resources that I have had the chance to use or learn about. The aim is to make this a valuable repository of resources for PMs at different career stages to use and learn from.
Product-Market Fit Pyramid
The famous NASA Space Pen story serves as a reminder for why it is important to refrain from jumping right into solution space and stick with the problem space as a Product Manager. Dan Olsen's product-market fit pyramid is a great tool to understand the fine line that exists between problem and solution space. Your product's feature set and UX live in solution space. There is no product, design or feature that exists in problem space. Instead, problem space is where all the customer needs, pain points, desires reside.
The Importance-Satisfaction Framework
We all know about Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, but what about products and product users. It doesn't matter if you have unique features and a great design if your platform is always bugging and has terrible load time. If you find yourself in such a situation, it's probably due to poor prioritization; prioritization that should be based on customer value. That's where this framework comes in handy. Importance measures how important a customer need is to the customer, and satisfaction measures how satisfied the customer is with the existing solution(s) that address that need. Uber's strategy to meet underserved needs is a great use case of this framework.
The Kano Model
The Kano Model is also very useful for understanding the customer needs and satisfaction with different products, features, and solutions. We will use an the analogy of a car buyer to understand this framework:
Performance: performance needs are ones where "more" is better. If car A has more fuel efficiency than car B, the customer will inevitably lean towards A.
Basics (Must-Haves): are needs that don't create satisfaction but rather ones of which the absence creates dissatisfaction. Keeping with the same example, if car A doesn't have seat belts and B does, no performance differentiator could convince customers to purchase car A.
Delighters: provide unexpected benefits which result in high satisfaction. GPS navigation systems were delighters when the first car models adopted this technology in the mid-1990s.
Understanding the MVP
A common practice in product management is to put too much emphasis on the word "Minimum" when developing and MVP (Minimum Viable Product). My advice is to focus just as much on the word "Viable." An MVP must be viable to the customer. Do not use the word "Minimum" to rationalize a partial MVP that is barely functional or an MVP with poor user experience. The image above illustrates that a true MVP that focuses on all four areas giving the highest priority to functionality and reliability, and a low yet not negligible importance to usability and delightful features.