TL;DR of How to Get Started with Your Product

Tools and Techniques

• Create a statement a product vision for your product, rendering a clear path for your product and focusing on solving a problem of the customer.
• Be able to tell a story about your product, even if it does not exist yet.
• Conduct market and trend analysis to know how to best position and change your product.
• Evaluate opportunities to make sure you are focussing your work on the right problem to solve.
• Define measurable assumptions and hypotheses that you can validate with customers.
• Build a rapid prototype to test your primary premises quickly.
• Create a minimum viable product that we called MVP to test your most dangerous assumptions and hypotheses whilst delivering customer value.
• Practice a simple checklist for the build and launch of your MVP
• Choose whether to pivot or continue with your product.

As a product manager, you play a pivotal role in the formulation of product vision and therefore in leading the visioning. Listen, but don’t make weak compromises.

Remember: when you are doing a visioning workshop with a large group of stakeholders, it’s important to listen to a different viewpoint but not to make weak compromises on the vision just to keep everybody in the room happy. I learned it from Pathao where was a large group of stakeholders.

I strongly recommended thinking about your product story first. Figure out the story you want to tell with your product is not just a fun exercise, a good story can help to unlock some important question like- Which customer are you targeting with the product? What do these customers look like and why?

The long and the short of it…