Product Management BUT on Hard Mode
Challenge Yourself to Go Further.
Product Management is a difficult discipline. It’s hard to pull a team together and make a real impact. With a busy calendar and a myriad of frameworks to choose from, it’s tempting to stick to what’s easy and comfortable. Sometimes that’s OK, but playing product management on hard mode can be both incredibly rewarding and help you get results.
Step up your product management game, with 5 ways to play product management on hard mode.
Evidence not confidence
Hypotheses not assumptions
Outcomes not features
Behaviour not goals
Focus not peanut butter
Evidence not Confidence (Discovery)
The cornerstone of Discovery is prioritising assumptions. It helps us articulate risk, and expose what we don’t know. Many product managers prioritise on a 2x2 grid with “importance” and “confidence” on the axis. BUT confidence is subjective and can be easily swayed by personal bias, office politics, or wishful thinking. The harder (and better) approach is to rely on importance and evidence.
Importance: Assess how critical each assumption is to the success of your product. If an assumption is wrong, does it torpedo your chance of achieving the desired outcome?
Evidence: What evidence have you gathered or sourced to support or refute that assumption. Are you relying on opinion or do you have robust data, user insights, or market research?
If your strategy is largely backed by opinions then do more discovery. The more evidence you have, the more objective your prioritisation becomes. By rooting decisions in tangible evidence rather than subjective confidence, you get a clearer view of reality. Your team is less likely to be blindsided and you’ll have firmer ground for deciding where to invest time and effort.
Hypotheses not Assumptions (Discovery)
Keeping a running list of assumptions (things that need to be true for your product to be successful) is better than nothing. BUT in hard mode, you transform your most important assumptions into hypotheses.
Moving from a vague assumption to a testable hypothesis, creates a clear path to product validation. Involve the team in experiment ideation. Ask, whow can you test this hypothesis in half the time and at half the cost? Measure actual user behaviours and make sure what you learn influences your strategy.
Outcomes not Features (Strategy)
When we start in product management we often begin with a feature-focused strategy, a to-do list of sorts. A patchwork of features without a common goal. Hard mode in contrast means adopting an outcome-focused strategy that keeps everyone focused on the real prize: delivering tangible, measurable value. It also helps teams understand why any feature is being built, focusing on the customer problem and thus enabling them to explore alternative ways to achieve the same outcome if the first attempt fails.
Human Behaviour not Vague Business Goals (Strategy)
If you’re operating in empowered product teams, and playing in easy mode you pass teams vague business problems to solve. E.g. Solve our churn problem. Giving teams autonomy to solve problems is great, but being too vague shirks your strategic responsibility. Instead, play in hard mode, work collaboratively to frame your strategic intent in terms of specific human behaviours you want to change. E.g. “Reduce the percentage of customers who abandon the product within the first week by encouraging them to complete the onboarding tutorial.” Defining your bets in terms of human behaviour gives teams something tangible to test. They have enough autonomy to change the behaviour however they see fit, but we’re creating measurable experiments around clear user actions, and gathering rapid feedback to see if it’s driving the intended change. We’re moving away from vanity metrics, toward tractable leading metrics that’ll provide a faster learning loop.
Focus not Peanut Butter (Strategy)
We like to be liked. Product Managers playing in easy mode spread their bets to keep as many stakeholders happy as possible. They promise to do something for everyone, they split the attention of their team and they spread it thin. We call it ‘Peanut Butter Strategy’, and it ends in underwhelming progress on a number of fronts.
If you’re playing on hard mode, you co-create a strategic priority. You focus on it over everything else. You identify a behaviour change you want to see, and you place multiple bets. If any one of those bets fails it doesn’t matter, because you’ve got 10 more initiatives in the pipeline behind it, all of them directed at the same focal point. At the expense of having difficult conversations on priorities, you’ve given your team a profound gift, you’ve given them space to follow through on promises and make an impact.
Embrace the Challenge:
Easy mode promises an easier life, but play on hard mode if you want to change the world. Expect evidence-based decisions to increase your hit rate. Expect Hypothesis-driven experiments to speed up your rate of learning. Expect placing more bets behind fewer priorities to help your team follow through on strategic priorities.
Hard mode is where the real magic happens.