5 Characteristics of the Product mindset
“Once your mindset changes, everything on the outside will change along with it."
Quote of the week
Every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity. If you go above and beyond the customer service side, people are much more likely to recommend you. ⠀
⠀- Stewart⠀
Defining Characteristics of the Product mindset
Habitual product managers have five characteristics in common.
1. They passionately seek new opportunities.
Habitual PMs stay alert, always looking for the chance to profit from change and disruption in the way business is done. Their greatest impact occurs when they create entirely new business models. New business models revolutionize how revenues are made, costs are incurred, or operations are conducted, sometimes throughout an entire industry. One reason that the emergence of the Internet as a new medium of business has been accompanied by dizzyingly high company valuations is that investors perceive its potential to profitably transform virtually every aspect of economic life.
2. They pursue opportunities with enormous discipline.
Habitual PMs not only are alert enough to spot opportunities but make sure that they act on them. Most maintain some form of inventory, or register, of unexploited opportunities. They make sure that they revisit their inventory of ideas often but they take action only when it is required. They make investments only if the competitive arena is attractive and the opportunity is ripe.
3. They pursue only the very best opportunities
and avoid exhausting themselves and their organizations by chasing after every option“Even though many habitual entrepreneurs are wealthy, the most successful remain ruthlessly disciplined about limiting the number of projects they pursue. They go after a tightly controlled portfolio of “opportunities in different stages of development. They tightly link their strategy with their choice of projects, rather than diluting their efforts too broadly.
4. They focus on execution—specifically, adaptive execution.
Both words are important. People with an entrepreneurial mindset execute—that is, they get on with it instead of analyzing new ideas to death. Yet they are also adaptive—able to change directions as the real opportunity, and the best way to exploit it, evolves.
5. They engage the energies of everyone in their domain.
Habitual PMs involves many people—both inside and outside the organization—in their pursuit of an opportunity. They create and sustain networks of relationships rather than going it alone, making the most of the intellectual and other resources people have to offer and helping those people to achieve their goals as well.
7 skills of the Product mindset
Leadership. A product creating requires to have the inner power to take the idea and bring it to real life. The client engager must be able to lead people. The position requires to be strong enough to fight with circumstances and people’s nature. And the last one is another tough work. Leadership has one great outcome. It brings independence to the person. We won’t keep a person who requires constant helicoptering. The client engager needs to take responsibility for the action of the team.
Strong analytical skills. All client engagers must be able to do a benchmarking and market analysis. We define the main competitors and put their products under a magnifying glass. We pay attention to their positioning and promotion too. During the research, we need to examine carefully individual aspects of users’ behavior. We know that the most valuable result of research is the conclusions. We usually take time before the start of the project and conduct internal market research. After the survey, we can speak with the client and understand business challenges. One more super-skill for our client engagers is to make a conclusion based on limited data. In rare cases, we have all the required information. The lack of information must not block the development process.
Quality pursuit. The quality of the product influences customer satisfaction and core values. It is the main requirement in competition wars. Your product can have fewer features, but they must work correctly and provide the best UX solution. The corresponding requirement for the client engagers to be able to define the quality level of the product. The next step is to lead the production to reach such level. A quality pursuit is not something that can easily be learned. This skill grows from personal development.
Growth mindset. We don’t like to run idle or develop just to bill hours. We are developing the product for the users. It is the core statement a client engager needs to keep in mind. We always face some issues on the market because it is a life. But the growth mindset helps to see possibilities and not to be scary (or blocked) by failures. This mindset thrives on challenges and not perceiving failures as the evidence of unintelligence. It is a heartening springboard for product evolution. The client engager must be able to possess the existing strengths of the product and use all the potential of the market. Product design has to include opportunities for future development from the very beginning.
Technical skills. The client’s team has limited knowledge of software development. It is true for most of the products. The client engager is the translator from the developers’ language to the client-friendly. The useful skill at this point is to understand the reasons and alternative ways of solutions. The client engager must know the architecture, technical requirements, and technical risks. And vice versa, the client engager must convert business needs to the technical requirements for our company.
Planning skills. The client engager must understand strategic product goals. It helps to create a plan for goals achievement based on potential causes and effects. Every product must have a few roadmaps (the basic one and at least 2 for the unhappy path).
Communication skills. The client engager is the voice of the client in our company. This person must deliver the product idea to everybody: the production team, stakeholders, clients, marketers, and community. This position is a man in the middle. It requires the ability to understand the needs of each part and explain it to the other one.
Read of this week :
Thanks, Productmindset