I originally wrote this article to be used as part of a training program I designed for internal candidates that were interested in moving to Product roles at one of my previous companies. I believe the points it raises and the ideals it expresses are important enough to share more widely.
At the most basic level, Product Management is a creative practice, an art as much as a science. PM’s build consensus, lead meetings, do research, write requirements and specifications, create wireframes, and so much more – but at the heart of it all we call new products into being. We are the glue that ties together stakeholders, engineers, designers, shareholders, and more to take things from the realm of ideas to the realm of the real. And at the end of it, if everything is done right, we end up with a good product – something that everyone who worked on it can be proud of.
But what does a “good product” look like?
Good Products empower customers to be better at what they do
We will continually look for ways to make our customers better at their jobs. Tactics will include but are not limited to automating tedious tasks, surfacing resources, providing better tools, surfacing the value users create to their peers and customers, and more. We will serve our customers and treat them as real stakeholders whose interests and user experiences are important.
Products deliver lasting value by enabling users to to more, do the same things more easily, or both. Sales, Customer Services, and other adjacent teams rely on Product to deliver that value so they can sell it and support clients in accessing it. We will constantly look for new opportunities to build differentiated and compelling tools that deliver on that promise in powerful ways. If we have to choose between what is easier for us and what will empower our customers and end users, we will prioritize the users every time.
For each proposal ask:
- Is this proposal going to increase end user engagement by providing clear value?
- How does this proposal expand the reach and capacity of the customer? Is our goal to automate work, expand scale, increase engagement, add visibility, drive institutional change, or something else? If it’s something else, how does it empower the customer?
- What is the unique value for our customers – as distinct from what they could gain via any other tool?
Good Products are put customers at the center of our process
Very few startups are lucky enough to have an open field with no direct competitors. Even for those in such an enviable position, it will not always be the case and product leaders cannot afford complacency. If and when our customers are approached about alternatives, we want them to respond with complete disinterest. That is only possible if we are proactively meeting their needs. In order to do so, we will approach our customers with humility and put their voices at the center of our product scoping and prioritization process. From surveys and listening sessions to user testing and more, we will take every opportunity to make sure that the voice of the customer is heard loud and clear in everything we build, and that the products we release have strong market fit.
Having a single tightly-grouped set of customer personas gives us focus instead of needing to be everything to everyone. Further, this approach allows us to drive systemic change instead of individual change – and systemic change is inherently more scalable and impactful at scale.
For each proposal ask:
- Which customers have asked for this? What do they care about? Have we fully understood and internalized their pain points and considered all options before jumping to solutions?
- What is the value of this proposal from the customer’s standpoint? If we are successful in launching it, what will the rave reviews from happy customers focus on? And what will unhappy customers be upset about? What steps are we taking to maximize customer joy and minimize new frustrations?
- What are the best options for customer research? Should this be a survey, focus group, listening session, or something else? How can we best ensure product:market fit before a single line of code is written?
- How does this proposal help the customer look good?
- How does this feature or product empower our customer and help them get a seat at the table?
Good Products are beautiful because we will take the time to get them right
Beauty isn’t just visual aesthetics (though those are critically important); it’s the sense of joy a user gets working with a product that is intuitive, powerful, easy to understand, and does the job it’s designed to do well.
This requires significantly more upfront work and research than the classic tech startup “move fast and break things” approach, but it is worth doing that work upfront because broken and incomplete products are unacceptable to our customers. Polish is part of what institutional buyers are paying for and one of the most important ways we can differentiate our offerings.
We will not make “minimum viable products,” we will make “minimum lovable products.” Everything we release must make our customers’ and end-users’ lives easier and add beauty to the lives of the people who use them.
We will not make perfect the enemy of good, but we will take the time during scoping, design, and build of each new process to add polish and make sure our interfaces are well-designed and our expected workflows enable our customers without adding new roadblocks or pain points. Through the combination of solid scoping and research, active customer feedback, intuitive design, thorough QA, and deliberate user testing, we will go the extra mile to make products that our customers love.
These are lofty goals and will sometimes be difficult to achieve, but it is worth the effort to do so because they are the key to delighting our customers. This will be reflected in business metrics around user satisfaction and sentiment and will be a core part of our process to evaluate the success of products post-release.
For each proposal, ask:
- How does this proposal add beauty to the customer’s work day? What are the key elements of the proposal that will make it a pleasure to use?
- Thinking through the user experience holistically, how will this proposal reduce stress and add joy to the customer’s day?
- Is it possible to simplify workflows, shorten usage funnels, and make it easier to pick the tool up and immediately get value?
Good Products create unique value
Differentiation is survival in a competitive marketplace and it is impossible to win a contest of ideas by repeating what everyone else is saying. That means being willing to take on hard challenges and solve them in new ways. We must have the courage to try new things that have not been done before.
Part of boldness is adding unique value with our offerings – solving new problems in compelling and powerful ways. Our company and each of our core products will be defined in terms of a core set of unique values that differentiate it both from our other products and from anything else in the market. Part of our unique value is the way we amplify the efficacy and power of other non-competitive companies in the space and we should keep this top of mind as we consider what to build.
New bells and whistles will be added if and only if they are in keeping with that unique value or add a new unique value that fits organically with the established set for that product. New opportunities for unique value that do not closely align with an existing product may point the way to future products and revenue opportunities, if they are in keeping with the value proposition for the company as a whole. We will never bloat our product with things that do not clearly add unique value for our company and our customers.
For each proposal, ask:
- What is the unique value of this proposal from the customer’s perspective?
- What are we offering them that is powerful, compelling, and something we can do better than anyone else?
- How does this proposal increase the value of the adjacent and integrated offerings that the customer is already using?
- If this proposal fails in market and does not add the unique value we were hoping for, how will we know?
Good Products are elegant
The difference between poetry and prose is that it removes everything non-essential, revealing the beauty of the essential idea at the core. Our products must similarly eschew the scope creep and bloat that makes so many products sluggish and unintuitive. We will actively work to remove what is nonessential and make everything essential excellent. We win by only doing the things that matter and make sure all of those things that matter are done to their best potential. From the way we write product specifications to the code we deploy, we will always seek the most elegant and simple solution.
In doing so, we must strive to minimize what we ask of our clients and offer them clear and compelling value for every action we request of them. Each UI element must have clear and compelling value to the user and be easy to understand. Every time we increase the mental bandwidth required to use our products without providing a payoff for that increase, it makes our product less elegant, less intuitive, less valuable.
We must always remember that blunt force solutions are very rarely the best, and there is usually a more elegant solution available. We will do the work to find that solution. We are here to add beauty to the world and to our clients lives. Our products should be a pleasure to use.
For each proposal, ask:
- Is there anything non-essential that we can remove from this scope of work?
- What is the most compelling and essential part of the value proposition here?
- Will clients share our understanding of that core value? If it’s different, why and how?
- As we do user scoping and testing, what are the surprises here? Where did we expect them to find value that they didn’t?
- What can we cut from scope in order to devote the resources we need to fully develop that core value?
Good Products break down barriers
We are not reinventing the wheel; we are making it easier and faster for customers to find the wheels they need. In a real sense, our CMS product is plumbing designed to put the right content in front of the right people as easily as possible.
As we define and launch future products and features, we will actively work to remove barriers for our customers and help them more effectively support the end user.
For each proposal, ask:
- How does this feature break down barriers?
- How can this be embedded into the client organizations from the lens of culture and organization?
- What is the impact of this feature and who does it empower? How does the end user impact requirements?
Good Products are accessible to all
Accessibility to people with disabilities is a moral imperative and is non-negotiable. The willingness to care about other people and do the extra work to help our neighbors is a key part of what makes us human. In the education space, it is often also mandated by law, but even if it wasn’t, it would be worth the effort to do it. Every product we build will meet the highest possible WCAG and ADA standards and update to new versions of those standards as quickly as possible upon release – ideally within a single semester.
Even beyond issues of ability, we should continually look for ways to ensure our products are accessible to everyone – for example creating a strong and easily interpretable design language can make products more accessible to people who are not native English speakers. Conditions like this add work to the scoping and design process. We will do the work.
For each proposal, ask:
- Is this feature accessible to disabled people? How will vision impaired, deaf, or other users who may require accommodations access it? How do those accommodations impact usability and the value that is being delivered?
- What measures have we taken or can we take to make sure that the feature is truly accessible to all?
- How does our design language translate?
Good Products facilitate diversity, equity, and inclusion
The business world has rarely paid more than lip service to the value of human diversity. We must do better and embrace diversity while fostering equity. This includes racial and ethnic diversity, but also class, neurodiversity, sex, and the needs of people across the entire broad spectrum of human sexuality and gender expressions. If we make design assumptions or use language based on what is common for a given group without considering how it will be interpreted by others, we are failing our customers.
The most successful products will recruit, serve, and retain diverse user populations. They can do that most effectively by fostering equity and inclusion. Doing so at scale is difficult since, by definition, it involves people working outside their comfort zones and supporting people with different lived experiences. We can make this process easier and more scalable through better tools.
Diversity must also be reflected internally. We must work deliberately to recruit and support teammates from diverse backgrounds and hold each other accountable to making sure that all voices are not just welcome but celebrated on our team. This will sometimes be challenging. We will rise to the challenge.
For each proposal, ask:
- How does this feature help our clients foster and support inclusion?
- How will this product help shape the future of higher education in a more equitable way?
- How does this feature help our clients deliver value for diverse student bodies at scale?
Good Products have imagination
As Angela Davis once said, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” We are not here to do easy things. We are here to do hard things, and to do them better than they have been done before.
We must keep our imaginations open to new ways of creating beauty for customers and end users so that we can deliver on that promise. Imagination is hard to quantify and harder to measure, but we will make the effort to recognize it and appreciate it as a team.
For each proposal, ask:
- What new opportunities does this proposal create? How do those opportunities enhance the value of our products and add beauty for our customers?
- What does this proposal bring that is new or innovative? What are we doing that has not been done before and why do we believe it will work?
- Is this proposal retreading old ground? If so, what can we learn from past attempts by ourselves or others to make our implementation better? What other approaches have been tried and failed? What can we learn from those failures?
- Where is the spark for this proposal?
Good Products are not perfect, but they will always be improving
Perfection is impossible. Indefinite improvement as we search for perfection is essential. Each release of our product must improve on the last in some way. We will avoid adding technical debt wherever possible, even if that means occasionally going a little slower, because debts are always paid with interest. We believe it is worth the time to do things right. We will not fix things that work unless we have a high degree of confidence we can make them work even better. We will focus our finite time and resources on the areas where we can have the biggest impacts and do the most good for our clients and for the long-term health of the product.
For each proposal, ask:
- How does this proposal improve on previous versions?
- What is the net value of those improvements and who will see that value?
- How can we improve this feature or product in the future?
- How does this iteration add value now and prepare us to add additional value in the future?
Final thoughts
At the core of this document is the belief that our most important goal is to add beauty to the world. Those who embrace this product philosophy will do so be building world-class products that are a pleasure to use and make our customers’ lives better, but we will also seek to add beauty to the world in the way our teams operate internally.
We will support each other, hold each other accountable, and help each other be our best selves. We will lift each other up when we fail. And we will succeed, together.