Tag: Failure

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customer General productive revenue

You should fire your Product Manager if…

Are your customers jettisoning you by the hordes? Or are they leaving you in a trickle? Is your product revenue becoming a sinking ship or a leaky bucket?

Customers will soon turn too busy for your product only when your product manager becomes too busy for the customer.”

A product manager is responsible not just for building a product that works, but more importantly, one that sells and sticks.

1. Building the nuts and bolts of a product that works is probably the easier part (oops! engineers, no offence). That is engineering.

2. To make sure a product indeed meets the needs and aspirations of customers is challenging.

3. Creating an ecosystem of product+experience (support and service) is where the magic is created. That is where the rubber hits the road.

And this activity cannot be 100% outsourced to Marketing, Sales, Support or Service functions.

When customers decide to swear by your product, it is crucial to understand the why

When those customers decided that your product is not worth their wallet, it is vital to understand the why.

When those key prospects are still undecided, to test your product, it is still essential to understand their why too.

Listening to customers and users is a vital part of product management. Much to the chagrin of many organisations, l product managers tend to be internally focused on product engineering only. Product engineering is a ‘part role’ of a product manager.  What is core is to listen, to meet and to interact with the product’s long time users, customers and, (more importantly), the ones that dumped the product after the first few uses.

This is what good product managers do. Understanding the customer, listening to them, and bringing in the right features functionalities in the product they are building is the key. And these cannot be done by being internally focused.

Meeting customers is a part of the day job of a product manager. It is just as important or more than looking at the spreadsheets for sales and profitability or those slides for marketing or the PRD for engineering. I would add first-hand interaction and information collection with the customer gives life and purpose to the product.

And product manager who becomes too busy for a customer will soon see customers who become too busy for the product. #LawOfKarma or #CommonSense

Thoughts? What is your experience?

Categories
Leadership Lesson

Why Making Mistakes is Important in Life

I have written about Of learning, failure and my perspective. I had also spoken about it on Prodcast on Leadership Lessons – Learning to Fail and Preparing for a Fail .

There was so much interest that I have tried summarising the same with 9 reasons on why making mistakes is okay, and 6 ways on how to recover from a mistake.

  1. Mistakes are an unavoidable part of life and are vital to a person’s growth.
  2. Everyone makes mistakes.
  3. Mistakes make up most part of our lives. And it is because of the mistakes one learns. A child makes mistakes a thousand times and falls as many times before her first step.

Reasons why making mistakes is okay

  1. Mistakes give you valuable life lessons.
  2. They say mistakes are life’s way of teaching you. Behind each mistake is an important lesson to be learned.
  3. You are only human, and humans are not made to be perfect. It is what makes each of us unique.
  4. Mistakes help you grow. The first time that you will smell success is after the last time you learnt from your earlier mistake. Mistakes they say is a steppingstone to success.
  5. Mistakes push you to do better, be better. They help you become a better version of yourself.
  6. Mistakes help you know yourself more. It allows you to figure out who you are as a person.
  7. Mistakes do not define you. In fact, errors do not stand for anybody.
  8. You will never find anyone who has never made a mistake in their life. If someone said they did, that not telling the truth.
  9. When you make a mistake, you know one more way in which it should not be done

How to recover from a mistake

  1. Accept it – Accepting that you have made a mistake is the first step towards correcting it. What you do not accept, you cannot correct. Accept that mistake. Learn from it.
  2. Know what you did wrong. Understanding your mistake helps you make amends and rectify the situation.
  3. Remember the lesson
  4. Mistakes are normal. Fret not! Everybody makes mistakes.
  5. Accepting the mistake is the first step towards correcting them in the future.
  6. Do not be afraid of making mistakes. It should not prevent you from taking risks or doing anything worthwhile.

“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow.” – Mary Tylor Moore

Here is a Spotify Prodcast on the subject

Spotify Prodcast on Failures

83 -second Video on Making Mistakes

Categories
Uncategorized

Of Learning and Failure

I was recently engaged in a heated debate on ‘learning’ and ‘failure’, and how failing in public is the mark of weakness in professional and social situations. For one’s own good, it was argued that it is best avoided to even talk about failures in public. A logical extension is that one avoids asking questions in order not to demonstrate ignorance. Since they do not ask questions. My argument was. Hence they learn lesser – and so the case goes.

Personally, I learn all the time from all types of people. I can not comment for others, but the more I learn, the more I know that I do not know much. I am never too old to learn or too young to ask questions.

Yes, we live in a society where asking questions means either ignorance or arrogance—but seldom associated with learning as a process.

We live in culture where failure is mocked upon. Failure is discouraged and hence people stop trying. One may not hold ‘failure as a badge of honour’ as the Silicon Valley adage goes, but not failing and hence not learning and that is a bigger dishonour.

As a life -long learner, who tries, who fails regularly and learn from those failures, I have no shame in saying if I am learning, I must be doing good. I make mistakes all the time, and I accept the mistakes and learn and try and become better.

I own my mistakes, and no one is responsible for my failures. No one else. Yes, it may be fashionable for larger than life leaders for whom projecting infallibility is a virtue. They do not accept a mistake and claim that never made a mistake, and they are the best and even blame everyone else but themselves for all the failures. Good for them. Their life choices. That is not me.

And I am happy I am not them. I fail, and therefore, I learn. And that makes me me.