The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
Several years ago when I was in business school, I had the opportunity to meet Mr. Jonathan Rosenberg —Former SVP of Products at Google, and current advisor to Alphabet Inc.
Mr. Rosenberg is also well known for his famous book “How Google Works” which he co-authored with Eric Schmidt—the ex-CEO of Google (2001-2011).
I met Mr. Rosenberg at Washington University in St. Louis briefly after his fascinating talk about building world-class products scheduled earlier that evening. He was speaking to an auditorium full of MBA students, many aspiring Product Managers amongst them (including yours truly).
At the time, I remember taking copious notes as he shared his experiences about building products in general, and Product Management in particular.
These were his observations and mental models from building products at Google. Products that we are all very familiar with - Search, Ads, Gmail, Android, Apps, and Chrome. He spoke at length about his Product Management mental models including how to identify strong Product leaders. Mr. Rosenberg hired several Product leaders at Google, most notably, he directly managed Marissa Mayer, ex- CEO of Yahoo. It was a riveting talk.
It was also when I first learned about mental models as a way of making good decisions consistently.
As luck would have it, a few months after that talk I started as a Product Manager in a Multi-Billion Dollar Global Industrial Corporation. And for the next 6 years, I experienced first hand, the roller coaster ride that is building products. Several Years since meeting Mr. Rosenberg and listening to his experiences —I’ve been living, experiencing, and validating many of the ideas and mental models he talked about in my own product work.
In this post, I wanted to share some of these ideas — my deeply held Product principles that now serve as mental models as I make product & hiring decisions. I also explain briefly about the rationale behind each model that I share with you here.
And while these principles are deeply held—I am constantly looking for evidence that challenges these models. If you have insights or feedback, I would love to know about them.
So here goes. Let’s start with the mental model that I often use to answer a question that I get a lot from aspiring PMs - “Do I need an MBA to become a Product Manager?”
Mental Model: An MBA helps — but is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to build Products.
No matter where you went for your MBA —the gist of an MBA program is “How to minimize business risk & maximize business returns”. Most Business schools teach you how to avoid risks, not how to maximize learning & speed.
But let me first say this. If you have an MBA, you actually do have a good chance to land a PM job in setups that require you to manage a well-established product. Your job is simply to make sure you minimize any risk to the product’s sales while exploiting (mostly incremental) opportunities. On the cross-functional collaboration front, the MBA helps too, because most MBA programs out there focus on leadership & interpersonal skills development.
But an MBA does not automatically help if you are building a Product from scratch. If you are building something that’s never been built before—you need a skillset that structured programs like an MBA don’t prepare you for.
Instead, you have to get your hands dirty. You have to get out of your cozy office and become a market participant. Spend time talking to potential customers, interviewing them, and understanding what to build. You have to learn, unlearn and relearn quickly. You have to take risks and experiment a lot. The focus is on solving a problem lots of people care about. The focus is on speed, not on short term business returns. You have to be charismatic, optimistic, and realistic all at the same time. Building and launching a product from scratch requires a very different skillset. MBA programs don’t typically teach this stuff.
Ok, here are some more.
Mental Model: The factors of production have changed - From Land, Labor, and Capital to Free information, Internet, and free Computing cycles
In just the last few decades, we have experienced a tectonic shift in our production functions —i.e. our ability to create products and our ability to hit scale.
Today you don’t need to be a landowner or a capitalist to create an enterprise. If you have a computer and an internet connection — you can launch a product. Unprecedented gains in microprocessor performance coupled with rapidly declining prices and the more efficient use of computing cycles have dramatically reduced the time to learn & innovate on a business plan.
Product Distribution has changed too. The middlemen and market makers (platforms) are now online and creators can access them at a click of a button. If your product is good, it’s absolutely possible to reach millions of people in a very short time. Word of mouth has never been more transformational.
As a result of our newly transformed production functions, there are millions of new producers and sellers in the market. And your product is going to face some really tough competition. Thanks to the proliferation of products and platforms, your target customers have ever reduced attention spans.
We must build with this reality in mind.
Mental Model: When people search for products, better ones will always come to the top, organically.
Word of Mouth is transformational —and it’s Organic. No marketing channel can generate more returns per unit marketing dollar invested than if your customers turn into your marketers. It is the true flywheel —once you are able to set it in motion, the returns multiply with no incremental effort.
But remember this —our flywheel’s momentum is a function of two things. The amount of effort we put in to set things in motion & the quality of your product.
There are several ways to set things in motion—building a passionate community, creating viral loops, well-crafted referral programs. You know all about that of course.
But what sustains the flywheel’s momentum is how good your product is. Does it really deliver on what it promises? Does your product make its referrers look like superstars?
As a Product Manager, you must strive to make your product better than others. Before anything else, focus on solving the problem that it promises to solve. Then make your users look like superstars for using it.
Mental Model: What is one deep insight that your product offers?
To me, this was one of the most important comments from Mr. Rosenberg that evening.
“Why should this product exist?” is something that I ask myself and to my Product Managers, about the products that we build. The best and most successful products out there not only solve problems for their users but leave them richer with insights that they’d otherwise not have.
My personal favorite example of a product with deep insights is the Apple Watch. While I’ve been into running and swimming for a long time, I have never really bothered to get better at either. I recently (finally) bought my first apple watch to track my runs and swims —but the product is just so much more than just that.
It’s made me much more aware of how much I should move, reminding me to deep breathe and telling me how much sleep I’ve been getting. These well thought out and well-designed insights are super useful and have made me re-think my overall health habits instead of just my aerobic capacity (which is why I bought the watch).
To offer these insights, one must figure out the soul of the product. Ask yourself these questions often — Why do people buy my product? What are the technical possibilities? What does a 10x improvement look like? What about 100x?
Mental Model: Finding great Product Managers is hard. They are a rare species. When hiring Product Managers, look for simplicity & passion- not complicated answers. It’s easy to make things complicated
Product Managers are interesting people. The great ones even more so. Two things that I have observed in great PMs — They have amazing clarity of vision, and they are exceptional in reducing complexity for everyone in the organization. They might seem like lonely thinkers, but cometh the hour and they somehow can transform into prime movers of change. But how do you find them?
Mr. Rosenberg articulated it best when he said - The best Product Managers are simple but passionate dreamers. And that is what one should look at for hiring PMs. I once attended Marty Cagan’s famous workshop (“How to Create Products that Customers Love”) in New York, and Marty pretty much said the same thing.
Find people who can paint a picture, tell a story. Find people who are infinitely curious, non-linear thinkers. Find people who have dared to start their own businesses. These are the people that can wade through the complexity that comes with building products. People that can see and simplify the messy middle. People with empathy for fellow human beings.
Mental Model: Prototypes > Powerpoint
Powerpoints are powerful storytelling tools for Product Managers, but nothing is more powerful than showing stakeholders something that actually works —even though it’s super primitive. Prototypes are especially powerful when you are selling your vision for the product.
You get much better feedback on your ideas when People are interacting with a prototype instead of starting at a PowerPoint. It helps people connect with the product vision, and have a somewhat realistic experience of using it. Prototypes help you understand important user idiosyncrasies to solve for, that’d otherwise be handwaved into “Edge Cases”.
Mental Model: There are no eureka moments in building Products — it is a long process. It involves difficult iterations, learnings & heartbreaks.
Frankly speaking when Mr. Rosenberg articulated this product truth —I was a little surprised. What do you mean there are no eureka moments? Don’t geniuses like Picasso just know how to create a masterpiece? Turn out the answer is NO.
Pablo Picasso created “Bull” in 1945, a series of eleven lithographs, which has become a masterclass on how to develop something from realism to abstraction. The gist of the process was iteration.
Every painting that Picasso created involved meticulous planning, dissection, and iteration over long periods of time. Sometimes he would take detours from the central idea, paint something completely different and seemingly unrelated at first, and then come back to the main idea to iterate on it and complete it. It’s fascinating just how pivotal iteration is to the process of creating anything.
Similarly, there are rarely any “moments of brilliance” in building products. On the contrary, it is about breaking the big vision into simpler executables and then painstakingly building each executable. iPhone designer Jony Ive’s philosophy around product design sums it up —“A Thousand NOs for Every YES”.
To add to that thought —Treat every NO as an iteration - until you get to the “Yes”.
Mental Model: Don’t just say “it’s okay to fail“. Create an org where failure is acceptable. Only then people will Sign up for crazy goals. Only that will move the needle.
Unfortunately, many product setups simply pay lip service to the whole “its okay to fail” philosophy. But if you are a Product leader in your organization, it is your responsibility to build a culture where failure is not a taboo. Create an environment where failures are not looked down upon —instead, learnings are celebrated and applied to the next iteration.
At the very minimum, your product team (any team really) must have a sandbox to experiment, and some air cover — so that they can sign up and shoot for crazy goals. Only if you sign up for crazy goals, will you move the needle.
You’d think it would be easy to create an ‘experimentation/moonshot sandbox’ within a large organization with lots of cash —but that is rarely the case— unless you have visionary leadership that sees beyond the short-termed cash cycles.
On the other hand, for a scrappy startup, their future success is based upon the number of times they fail, learn something important, and bounce back to iterate and apply that learning. This ability to Fail and bounce back is in many ways the core competitive advantage for a startup, and this certainly moves the needle — faster and several times over.
About Mental Models
In closing, Mental models are a great way for anybody to make sense of problems faster and approach them with validated frameworks.
If you are building or managing a product —I recommend that you look at the (product) decisions that you make, especially ones that typically take you a lot of time, and where being correct quickly is valuable. (e.g. hiring the right person for a key position before somebody else hires them ).
For these decisions then — document as to how and why you made a certain decision —and then close it out with the outcome of the decision. Now that you’ve experienced this whole decision-making to outcome process from first principles and you know the decision was correct, use that same decision-making framework going forward. That’s your mental model.
As you use your mental models - keep updating them with new learnings and insights and make more good decisions. Because when you repeatedly make good decisions, you receive compounding returns.
Thanks for reading! If you have questions or insights or feedback - reach out on twitter!
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
This post has been published on www.productschool.com communities.