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Product Management
How the best product people use mental models to build winning products
What separates product managers from product leaders
Spurred to reflect by the needless reminders of entering a new and hope laden year, I recently took an audit of every major product initiative I either lead myself or worked with a direct product manager report to build. My goal was to figure out if there was any tangible thread tying together projects that succeeded and those that did not — across years, companies, and disparate content, was there any winning strategy (other than dumb luck) that influenced whether product managers would be successful?
I thought my answer would lie with data, $$$, time, technical prowess, or some other resource based constraint. Instead, what I found was methodological— great product managers don’t build what their customers want — they build models. The most successful product managers had a knack for the intangible and elusive skill of building a mental model as a source for product decisions. Of course, this is not the only skill required to be an effective product manager nor the only common thread between successful initiatives, however, I’ve come to find it to be essential in making the jump from product manager to product leader. The following seeks to explore this…
