The secret to being a great product manager or product leader is mindset.
Cambridge dictionary describes mindset as; “a person’s way of thinking and their opinions”*
Product mindset is the way in which a product person thinks, acts and behaves when building digital products and services that customers love, which also create value for the business.
Trust me, this is easier said than done!
Based on my 13+ years working in, leading and coaching product teams, here are 12 principles underpinning a product mindset:
1. Pragmatism not perfection
Forget the textbooks and take best practices with a pinch of salt. Your flavour of the product mindset will be different to everyone else based on your context. In other words, your current reality dictates your starting point and the journey you might go on to reach your end goal
That doesn’t mean you should never get started. Just go easy on yourself and your team, and be realistic
2. Value first
Digital products must create value – value for customers which in turn creates business value. Thinking value-first means thinking customer-first. Thinking customer-first means focusing on the outcome of the work done rather than the output of the work
Being and acting value-first means using data to inform decisions, and measuring the outcome of those decisions as your products get into the hands of customers. It means asking difficult questions of yourself and your teams if value is not being created. Why is value not being created? What can we do differently to create value?
3. Curious and continuous
Digital products and the teams developing these products are long-lived. The product development journey is never-ending and continuous. This might sound scary – it’s also exciting and transformational!
Thinking and acting continuously means you’ll never stop learning, never stop improving and never stop iterating. It means waking up every day with a spring in your step, knowing you have the opportunity to do better than yesterday.
The best way to unlock this continuous stream of learning is to be curious. Ask questions, seek to understand and look for alternative opinions and perspectives to your own. Curiosity is a product team’s superpower – unlocking substantial professional and personal growth for every member of the team.
4. Ask instead of assume
Digital products and software development in general is full of assumptions and unknowns. For someone without a product mindset, those assumptions and unknowns might be ignored. Or they might be captured but never explored, falsified and sized.
A product mindset means making those assumptions known and actively trying to understand the nature of the assumptions, their likely impact on the product and the best ways to mitigate. A product mindset asks the difficult questions and finds ways to answer (at least to some degree) these questions before any code is written, and before any change reaches production.
5. Prototype before production
When you ship to production, you should be doing so with some level of certainty that the change fixes or solves a customer problem, enables a customer opportunity or creates meaningful and measurable value.
The way a product mindset increases the certainty of realising these outcomes (or reduces the uncertainty of not realising the outcomes) is through prototypes. Faster and cheaper to build, prototypes are a product team’s best friend to increase certainty/reduce uncertainty. Ranging from low fidelity sketches on a page to high fidelity live-data journeys, there’s a prototype for every situation!
6. Results over requirements
Product people don’t focus on requirements. Sure, when we build and ship digital products, the features and capabilities of those products need to work. That means being clear on the components and use cases for those features/capabilities.
Far more important in a product mindset are the results and impact generated as a result of the products (including the features and capabilities) that we ship. Obsess first about understanding your customers, then about how to measure success. If you’re obsessing about requirements you probably don’t have a product mindset.
7. Discovery drives delivery
Product folks with a product mindset know they should spend most of their time on product discovery, with far less of their time on product delivery.
Product discovery is a set of continuous behaviours demonstrated by product teams to know their customers, to understand their problems and opportunities, to ideate on solutions and to test the assumptions underpinning those solutions.
Seen from another perspective, product discovery helps us figure out what to build, who we are building for and how they will benefit. Achieving these 3 objectives means significantly reducing the time, cost and risk of shipping software that creates no benefit or value for its users.
8. Outcomes over outputs
We build digital products and develop software to create impact and to generate value. Or to express in another way, we build to achieve outcomes.
A product mindset recognises that hard work and task completion are prerequisites of outcomes. However, the focus is not on the task completion itself (the output). If we complete a task or set of tasks and create no meaningful impact, we’ve wasted time, effort and money.
9. Experimental instead of expected
A product mindset is a growth mindset. It is focused on abundance and limitless possibilities. It is experimental.
Building digital products means acknowledging and mitigating uncertainty and the unknown. Predicting the unpredictable is an impossible task – we never know what to expect. By focusing on experiments, we can quickly and continually increase certainty by testing our hypotheses with customers. An experimental mindset harvests feedback and insights – growing the agility needed to pivot and course correct without losing momentum.
10. Inclusive instead of exclusive
A product mindset shifts the traditional view of “them” and “us” that so often exists in organisations with immature product capabilities. “Them” refers to stakeholders and “Us” refers to the product team.
A product mindset refers only to “we” and is focused on nurturing productive, challenging and mutually beneficial relationships with subject matter experts across the business. Instead of excluding these people from the product development process, we include them from the outset, bringing them on the journey.
11. Cross-functional and collaborative
Siloes often exist in the absence of a product mindset. Teams are set up based on internal structures, capabilities and processes. Teams subsequently struggle to collaborate and often find they are pulling in different directions
A product mindset focuses on constant collaboration and working cross-functionally. That’s why every product team has folks from product management, design and engineering. When those 3 disciplines work together, extraordinary digital products can be created.
For many organisations this means thinking very differently about the way their teams are structured and organised. In other words, the product team topology
12. End-to-End
To bring this together, the last characteristic of a product mindset is thinking expansively, considering the “end-to-end”. How do customers experience their journey with your organisation and its products from start to finish? In that journey, what are the main online/offline touchpoints? How does each stage in that journey rely on the last step and impact the next step?
In siloed organisations, this end-to-end approach rarely exists and it leads to customers suffering through very disjointed experiences.
If you need someone to guide you on your journey, I can help with product leadership coaching, product advisory and team coaching, or product training and speaking
What product mindset principles would you add?
