What do I do to be a product manager of my own idea? Can you walk that through?
Last time I shared a post about how to get started as product manager if you don't have any background. I said "start doing the product management on your pet project." I now realized how circular that advice might have been.
A: How do I make an omelette?
B: Don't just talk about it. Start making an omelette?
A: ?!?
So let me share how I would go about creating my own pet product. Here are the big steps:
1. Pick an expensive problem to solve in your life.
2. Come up with a product idea that you can use yourself.
3. Write down how you are solving the problem without the product today.
4. Spell out how you want to interact with your product.
5. Fake the product to your potential customer.
6. Remove an interaction one at a time until you cannot remove any more without becoming useless.
7. Write down your finding.
Let me explain each step.
1. Pick an expensive problem to solve in your life.
One of the well-known secret for creating an excellent product (hence successful startup) is to solve one of your own problems. Why? Simple. That's because you don't need market research, customer focus group, user testing, etc. Anything and everything that you need to do with customer (and there are a lot!), you can do with yourself. So don't listen to your friend's problem. Don't ask your parents' for their problem. Look at yourself in the mirror and come up with your own problem that you can solve.
Now this ain't as easy as it sounds. Many people have no clue as to what kind of problem that people have until someone comes along and shows them how their lives can be better with the new wonderful product of theirs. Very famously when Henry Ford asked their would-be customers for what would make their lives better, they answered Ford by replying faster horses. No one knew of cars, so no one realized what it means to drive a car, and how fast and efficient it would get.
Luckily you don't have to invent a brand new product category to be successful. For our exercise you can pick anything that would be useful to you. And in order to do that effectively you must understand what problem that you are trying to solve.
When picking a problem, it's important that you think about how much you would pay to solve the problem that you have. This forces you to think about business aspects, and pick a product that's easier to sell. One tip is to look for anything that you repeat mindlessly that can be automated, or something that you spend a lot of time doing often.
For the illustration purpose, let's pick one of my own problems. I have content discovery problem. Because I want to read and write about interesting topic, I often find myself searching for interesting content that I have something to say about or an inspirational content that touched me in a special way. Not everything that I read is either interesting or inspirational. I have to spend time looking for the content each day. Hence the problem statement: I want to discovery interesting and inspirational content every day.
2. Come up with a product idea that you can use yourself.
Armed with problem statement, you are ready to pick your product idea. Think outside the box about how you can solve the problem.
One tip on thinking outside the box. Change your posture and physical location. Do something totally unrelated. Pick up a magazine, watch a movie, or go for a run. Do anything but focusing on how to solve the problem. Your brain works the most creatively when you are not fixated at the problem that you are trying to solve. Carry a deck of Post-It notes. Write down any and all crazy ideas when you are walking about in a unfamiliar physical location.
Another important note is to write down all crazy ideas. When you write something, a different part of brain gets activated than creative thinking part. And it captures the concepts that flashed in your brain in a split second. It's your way of reactivating those neurons at later time. Even if it may not make sense, write them down. I recommend writing at least a couple of dozen product ideas.
Let's use my content discovery example. I wrote down the following:
- Discover content from your Twitter
- Grab content from your friends
- Thought leaders' content (identified by their earlier posts)
- Favorite magazine content
- Trending topic
- Google News
- LinkedIn News
- Content locked in Gmail
- YouTube with high view count
- Most commented blog article
- Good bloggers
- etc.
Once the ideas are captured, put up the Post-It notes on a wall, and group them by a theme. I see two themes in my notes. One is source where content is drawn from, and two is how those contents get processed and discovered. Got it. My product will visit multiple sources, grab content from them based on the number of engagements and present it back to the user.
3. Write down how you are solving the problem without the product today.
People don't wait for the product to start addressing the problem. People are natural improvisers. When they don't have a custom-made solution, they improvise and create a solution of their own. This means even if there is no competing product in the market, your product will always have a invisible competitor. Often your biggest competitor is for the potential customers to do nothing. Continue using the existing hack is a real competition to your new product.
In my example, people discover interesting content by WSJ or NYTimes weekend edition. Or get them from their Twitter feed or Hackers News (as I said, I am solving the problem for myself). These are my competitors. Of course there are real competitors, like Zite, Flipboard, etc.
What you need to keep in mind is that you have to create your product to be different enough, more valuable enough to justify switching from their current solution. This may cause you to revise your product idea. That's ok. But also don't worry too much about having a competitor for now. Many successful businesses have started as the number two or number three in its market. If you pick a big enough market, you will be able to happily coexist along with your competitors.
Ok. It's getting late. I'll pick up from here later.
4. Spell out how you want to interact with your product.
5. Fake the product to your potential customer.
6. Remove an interaction one at a time until you cannot remove any more without becoming useless.
7. Write down your finding.
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