What you’ll learn in this article: Use an iterative framework to turn unknowns into action, and move toward clarity. Communicate through transparency, ownership, action, and follow up. By doing these things, we turn the unknown into discovery, and turn fear into creative possibility.
Most of us experience some level of fear or anxiety about the unknown. Cultures weave mythologies around “what lurks in the unknown”—the forest, the sea, underground, the stars, the human heart. What’s common in such stories is that the unknown is a place of vast and powerful darkness. It’s a place to be avoided, or if necessary…
The Product Management Scenarios Series examines scenarios presented by fellow product practitioners and others interested in the field. The goal is to start a conversation around scenarios — real or imagined.
Read 4 Iterative Practices for Navigating Product Management and Life for essential background on the foundation of my approach.
Scenario 4
What feature would you add to Amazon? Spec it out for Engineering to implement.
Quick summary: I’ve included an example product requirements document within this article, so it’s quite lengthy. Based on some actual research I demonstrate the kind of clarity I consider necessary for a product team to move into the EXECUTE phase of the framework. I’ve split this in two parts—1. Setting…
The Product Management Scenarios Series examines scenarios presented by fellow product practitioners and others interested in the field. The goal is to start a conversation around scenarios — real or imagined.
Read 4 Iterative Practices for Navigating Product Management and Life for essential background on the foundation of my approach.
Scenario 3
Who is the ideal customer for XYZ product?
Any product should have a customer acquisition funnel that identifies levels of engagement that should inform strategic alignment between product, marketing, and sales.
New product development can greatly impact the efforts of marketing and sales at different points of the funnel, and help convert more people into actual customers.
Freemium…
The Product Management Scenarios Series examines scenarios presented by fellow product practitioners and others interested in the field. The goal is to start a conversation around scenarios — real or imagined.
Read 4 Iterative Practices for Navigating Product Management and Life for essential background on the foundation of my approach.
Scenario 2
While working at Amazon as a Product Manager, they are about to launch a new Kindle Fire HD. How do you price it and why?
Pricing is a complex art. Assuming we’ve been able to validate product-market fit, we need to understand the context in which consumers and businesses perceive cost-value.
We should have a clear understanding prior to investing in new product development that the costs of producing the new Kindle Fire HD are…
The Product Management Scenarios Series examines scenarios presented by fellow product practitioners and others interested in the field. The goal is to start a conversation around scenarios—real or imagined.
Read 4 Iterative Practices for Navigating Product Management and Life for essential background on the foundation of my approach.
Scenario 1
You’re a Product Manager at Facebook. You’ve been tasked to build e-commerce into Facebook. What next steps do you take?
Quick summary: Seek to understand the opportunity and the mental models of your users, distill and share insights to generate ideas, and test what you expect to happen with actual users.
I want to invite fellow product managers into a conversation. I’m sometimes asked to share about my process and usually people seem most interested in my day-to-day tactical activities. As happy as I am to share these, they’re part of a larger framework that I think gets talked about too little.
I believe Product Management is best in a holistic framework, and like many things worth doing it requires us at our best. Even for those of us who have been doing this a long time, it’s continually a work in progress.
I was recently asked to share my approach…
My grandfather was a man with a knife. That may bring to mind an image of a fearful man slashing the world around him to protect himself, but that was the opposite of my grandfather. The knife did not define him. His life defined the appropriate use of the knife.
Some people carry weapons because they’re insecure. They feel safer knowing they can wield something dangerous in the world. Whenever my grandfather pulled his knife from his pocket—which was nearly everyday—it was an extension of the man he was, not a cover for a sense of insecurity.
He was a…
We all face problems and challenges. Some of us seek them out. Some of us passionately want to change the way things are and to invest ourselves in making the world a better place and helping people flourish.
We can respond to a challenge or problem from many different approaches. Some responses are personality driven or psychologically conditioned by our culture or upbringing. Taking on a challenge with awareness and intentionality moves us into the realm of design. Design is making something with intentionality. That’s the simplest and broadest definition I use, and some may take issue with that. …
We produce an HTML email newsletter once a month that has a readership of over 8,000 people. Outlook users account for only 2.5% of our readership, but that’s still nearly 200 readers. And we value people, so every one of them matters to us.
We don’t know for certain how many Outlook users experienced image explosion problems with our emails, but after researching how various versions of Outlook reinterpret HTML and CSS standards in some unexpected ways, we wrote a fix.
Here’s what the template should look like across all email clients:
Jase Miller
Navigating complexity. 🏉 Poet collaborating for a bold beautiful creative future via leadership, design thinking, UX, and Product Management at Kandji.io. ⚡️
