Maciej ("Ski") Skierkowski

If you are responsible for defining the product of your company/org your opinions (and thus ideas) don’t matter, customer dialog does.

As a product manager your job, among other things, is to define your product, that is, what the development team is supposed to build in order to satisfy the needs of the customer. This role can be disguised in many titles: Program Manager, Product Manager, CEO, etc. This has been my career for six years now both at Microsoft as a Program Manager and at PHP Fog as a Product Manager. In one case, Microsoft, there was very limited customer dialog (and damn it was hard to change that), and in the second, PHP Fog, I have a very rich dialog with customers. This had a number of downstream effects on their respective organizations and success. I want to share some of those observations in those two cases.

Microsoft: Limited customer interaction

1. To be successful you must have strong opinions. You must be the first to state the consensus conclusion during debates.
2. Product success criteria isn’t defined by product/market fit, it is defined by the most senior manager’s opinions/ideas (which are loosely correlated to product/market fit).
3. Product success/failure is not correlated to individual product success/failure.
4. You must persuade others to invest in ideas based on your arguments, opinions, ideas and research (not customer evidence).
5. The perceived leaders are those that voice their opinion first and loudest (quite literally).
6. Define fictional “scenarios” and “customer profiles” with fictional companies/names to highlight requirements.
7. You hear people say “In my opinion”, or “I think” and “customers want” (that last one is usually invented)

PHP Fog: Rich customer dialog

1. To be successful you must have strong customer evidence (sprinkled with some opinions)
2. Product success is based on market goals which we can measure
3. If I am successful as a PM I am making a very strong contribution to the success of  PHP Fog.
4. My team asks me what to build, and I merely rephrase our customers to make it actionable
5. The leaders are those that stimulate a productive environment and build relationships (team, partners, customers, investors, etc)
6. Product priorities and requirements are backed by countless pieces of customer feedback
7. Usually start sentences with “Customer [xyz] needs…”

Caveat: I am just highlighting the contrast, though at Microsoft some of those elements can vary in severity depending on the product.

As a product manager, if you want to build a successful product, start by throwing out your opinions. The magic is in being able to stimulate meaningful conversation with customers and making this actionable to the development team.