How to be a good product manager

While collecting information on UCD online, there is no doubt that such a book, "How to Be a Good Product Manager," saw the frontier introduction (in both English and Chinese):

If you want to be a bad product manager, add as much functionality as possible to your product. The more features a product is, the more likely it is to meet the diverse needs of users. Everyone hope that the product is getting better and better, ah, just add some more features like. Plus a bunch of small features better than plus a big function, we do not like more?
If you want to be a good product manager, try to use less refined http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/8534.html "> product features to bring value to customers. Customers buy products because they want Solve the problem at hand. Product function itself is meaningless, and only when a function really help customers solve the problem, this function is really a "function."

However, product managers are often not right. They come up with a list of features, and then let developers estimate the development time. They tend to want as many features as possible, so some important but time-consuming features are often not done. Products developed in this way are filled with less important, less powerful features.

Do not go to this stage you want to release a few features, product managers should count how much value to bring to the customer. Product management does not mean releasing the most features, on the contrary, you should publish the fewest features. Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product group said in a paper that good products rely on the design:

The job of a product manager is to define a product that is as simple as possible to meet the needs of the user. The simpler the product is, the easier it is for the user to understand it. The shorter the development time, the easier the product's technical architecture is.

Product managers also need to constantly consider the product's existing functionality is not really valuable, and sometimes should consider removing some of the features. When a product manager designs the simplest product that delivers value to customers, the product is easy to sell, easy to support, easy to maintain, and delivers greater value to users and the company.

English original:

If you want to be a bad product manager, try to deliver as many features as possible. The more features you have, the more likely you are to have the things that any individual customer cares about. Customers expect products to keep getting better, and the way a product keeps getting better is by adding more features. Plus, adding a whole bunch of smaller features will be just as good - if not better - than adding that one big important enhancement. More is always better, right?

If you want to be a good product manager, try to deliver the fewest features which will provide the most value. Customers in products because of the needs that the product fulfillills and the problems the product solves. exist to fill a need. Customers will find product features valuable only if those features satisfy a need and if the act of filling that need is something which is valuable to the customer.

Unfortunately, product managers often approach this problem the wrong way. They will create a long list of desired features and then get estimates from engineering on how much effort each requires. The most important features may take the most amount of effort, so, in the hopes of getting more features more quickly, a product manager will forgo the most time-consuming - and often the most valuable - enhancements to the product.

Rather than simply counting the number of features or the amount of enhancements, product managers should evaluate the ratio of value to effort and focus on obtaining the most value for the customer with a given amount of effort. As Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product group writes in Great Products by Design (which has been quoted here before and will likely be quoted here again):

The job of the product manager is to identify the minimal possible product that meets the objectives and provides the desired user experience - minimizing time to market, user and implementation complexity.

Instead of adding more features, product managers need to make sure they have the right features in their product and consider removing features when appropriate. By creating a product that provides the most value for the least amount of effort, a product manager will produce a product which is easier to sell, support, and maintain, and ultimately deliver more value to the customers and to the organization.

Personal experience:

In terms of content, I think it's also a lot of confusion for user researchers, at least for myself: there's always a lot of bright spots to show when looking at our previous user research and visiting users, but not a The product obviously can not meet all the functional requirements, the answer is obviously negative, first of all we can not think of all the functional points, and perhaps some of the features on the market we can see it can be done, but personally think how the customer needs It is hard to get a balance between the product and the product. I think the most important thing here is to identify the target user, the product function can maximize to meet the needs of the target user is the product's success, but there is still a problem: how to accurately define the target user. This requires good cooperation between our user researcher and marketing staff, and at the same time, it should also enhance its insight and keep learning.

Source: http://www.chucd.com/ucd/2.html