6: Finding Clarity and Creating Alignment

In this episode of the How to Succeed in Product Management Podcast, marketing professor Jeff Shulman and The Product Management Center advisory board members Red Russak and Soumeya Benghanem welcome Josh Haftel (Adobe) and Ben Waddle (Expedia) to talk about creating a product out of an idea by breaking it down into smaller, more manageable ones for a faster turn around and quickly get customer feedback, and how product managers need to work with their team instead of managing it.

Support for How to Succeed in Product Management is brought to you by Apptentive, which enables product managers to measure shifts in customer emotion and gather actionable feedback across the mobile customer journey. To learn more, go to Apptentive.com/UW.

What to Listen For:

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:10 A PMs job is finding clarity and then creating alignment
• 06:35 The Discovery and Framing framework
• 09:58 Always start at the fundamentals
• 15:01 Take the big things down and break them down
• 17:47 Fail quickly then go into future iterations
• 19:53 What kind of experimentation should you be doing?
• 25:31 Pick a problem that you might have some passion for  
• 28:12 Come up with hypotheses about why something's going to work versus why it's not going to work
• 30:39 Look for skills that your team currently don’t have
• 33:34 Understand who you need to influence and tailor your work products accordingly
• 38:38 Start with what outcomes matter to the audience you’re speaking to
• 42:52 The fastest way to get something into the hands of the customers
• 45:30 Break down big assumptions into smaller ones
• 50:23 Partner with your team to arrive at the best solution
• 52:55 As a product manager, you don’t manage anybody