One of the most important skills that I've found as product manager is coming up with a right problem to solve. Problem must be a real problem. It must be something worth solving. Something that has real impact to people. It cannot be too big to solve, but at the same time it cannot be too trivial that no one cares about.
When I look back at my college years, I completely got it backward. My college buddies and I would get together and start talking about what would be cool to build with the latest technology. I remember in 1998 working on dating website without really understanding what problem that we were solving. We had tools to build a site, we knew how, we had servers, so we went ahead and built a site. Because we knew how, we started building. And that's how many engineers think about, myself included
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| Start with problem definition; continue to sharpen the focus. |
