First Principles of Product Management
"The best features are those that solve real problems for your users." — Neil Patel
First Principles of Product Management
A first principle is a “basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”
First principle thinking helps PMs because as companies scale, communicating the rationale behind historical, current, and future decisions can be simplified in a way that their team and stakeholders can rally around. This enables people around the PM to move quickly in the same direction, decouple, and make smart trade offs without their presence.
The first principles of Product Management can be reduced to:
Maximize impact to the mission: develop a product strategy that maximizes the impact to an organization’s mission given a set of inputs.
Accomplish everything through others: PMs do not directly build or operate the product, instead they enable those around them to do it better.
Great product managers fuse these two principles into all their decisions and everything they do should derive from them.
Principle 1 ) Maximize impact to the mission
The focus of all employees in a company should be to fulfill the company’s mission, whether that mission is to earn billions, create social good, or both.
Product management does nothing to directly build or operate the product for customers. Instead, its core responsibility is to look ahead and inform the builders/operators of the product what the right path is to achieve the goal. That path is also called the product strategy, and the best ones are those that maximize impact to the mission.
Defining the product strategy is a massive responsibility… how does a PM do it? By looking at three inputs:
What the goal is
What the environment around them is signalling
What people, money, and time constraints exist
PMs use these inputs to form an opinion on the right path that will lead to fulfillment of the mission.
Product strategy is at the intersection of the inputs
When PMs know the goal, understand the environment, and respect the constraints, they have the necessary inputs to build a great product strategy, which sits somewhere in the intersection of those inputs.
Principle 2): Accomplish everything through others
As a PM, you cannot — absolutely cannot — forget that you accomplish everything through others.
Product Managers are like coaches of a sports team
Coaches don’t play
A coach doesn’t play. They are hired to support a team, and do so by helping them increase their individual and collective potentials. They are measured - by the team and owners alike - by winning. Generally, if a team doesn’t win, the coach is fired, not the players.
A PM doesn’t build, market, or support anything. We are hired to support a team in achieving our company’s goals. We do this by enabling the team to maximize their individual and collective potentials by aligning everyone on a product strategy (principle A) and fostering a healthy team dynamic.
The thing about first principles is that nothing else matters in the long run
Exploring the first principles of Product Management reveal that it demands equal effort from the left and right brains. It’s equal parts art and science. It’s equal parts hyper-rational and hyper-emotional.
It’s the polarity of these two ways of thinking that make the craft of product management complex, exciting, and frustrating all at once.
Success for PMs means respecting both of these principles equally. Create a product strategy that maximizes impact to the mission, and have a coach’s mentality to accomplish that mission though the people around you.
Brandon Chu wrote this on Jan 8 2018