It's the user (YOU), stupid

It's been about 20 months since I said yes to this product management role.  Earlier I spent my time thinking about how to write better code, how to coordinate development team, and how to scale the product in terms of response time and through put as individual developer to development manager role.

Now that I've spent about a year and half into wearing a different hat, I've come to appreciate the different set of challenges in bringing a new product to the market.  There are a lot of things to be said about becoming a good product manager, yet I think all of it can be summed up into one word: "user".

When you take a step back and think about it, it cannot be any more obvious.  You have to make a profit to be in a business.  To be good at making a great profit, you have to make a killer product.  To make a killer product, you have to understand what buyers want and who they are.  In order to understand buyers, you have to understand how they will use the product to solve a real problem.  Better you solve the user's problem, more you can sell the product, hence more successful business.  Simple enough.

But that's not so easy to do.  That's because there are lots of room for error.  One type of error is not focusing on individual user.  When you think about the market, customers and users, it's easy to group all of users into a category and start treating them as a group.  As you start thinking about the average user, it is easy to lose sight of the overall product.

Product is not sum of features and functionalities.  Product must be a collection of user experiences through which users can solve real problems and by which users can be emotionally engaged with the product itself.  You cannot design a product for an average user in a group.  To design a compelling product, its number one user, the first customer and the ultimate buyer has to be you, the product manager.  In other words, you have to design a product for yourself being the user.