PM traps to avoid - 2

 I have worked as a product manager for the past three years. If you've read books about product management but have never worked as a PM, you have a rosy picture of what a PM does. 

So I wanted to share a few traps that await you when you become a PM and how you can avoid them. 

You can read the first one - Don't be a warm body.  This post is about the second one. 

2. Don't buy into the hype machine

Your exec team have an idea. It fits with the strengths of the company. If this idea is successful, then your company will be wildly successful. They start selling this idea even before vetting it. They make plans about it. They talk about it in the all hands meeting. They bring you in as the PM for the product. 

You buy in to the idea and focus on building the product and getting it out to the market as soon as possible. 

You speak to your engineering team and they tell you it will take a long time to build. Given the hype inside the company, you don't find it difficult to get resources for the build. 

You speak to prospective customers and who appear super excited. If you ask for concrete committments everyone asks you to get back once the product is ready. After a long build time the product is now ready. You go back to the prospective customers who have expressed interest before. Now they are a little bit cool. They say the idea is good but it is lower in their list of priorities. One customer who helped you spec out the product says that the way you've built it is incompatiable. They ask for many changes to the product before they can integrate it. Now you realize that none of the prospecitve customers want to use the product. 

You wonder how can a product which is the future of a company fail so bad? 

Here what happened is that you've failed to test if the idea you have is solving a real problem? 

You allowed a costly build to happen without knowing if the product is useful. 

Understand that it is the PMs job to cut the hype and identify the hits from the duds. 

How to avoid this trap? 

• It is the job of the exec team and sales team to be rosy about prospects of the products and product ideas. 
• You as the PM should test the ideas as cheaply as possible to make a product usable, feasible and viable. 
• When faced with such a situation, you should speak with your customers. Use the Mom Test to understand if the problem you are solving is real
• Get concrete committments from interesting customers to understand the viability of the product. 
• If you are not able to get committments, it could be because of two reasons. First reason being it is not a real problem. Second reason they need to see the product to see the value. 
• If it is the first then  communicate it and help the company pivot to some other product. 
• If it is the second then use the testing strategies like mockups, static demos etc to test it out further. 
• Try a Debate meeting - Kim Scott in her Radical Candor book talks about Big Debate meetings. You can schedule one big debate meeting to discuss your concerns about what are the different ways in which it can fail and why it is not a great idea. That way you can easily persuade others that it is not an idea that is meant to be persued. 

Understand that it is the PMs job to cut the hype and identify the hits from the duds.