3 Things to Avoid as a New Product Leader

May 29, 2018 (6y ago)
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We have an amazing time building products for our customers, our drivers, and our restaurants. What does this mean? Lots of products and features. Being a small team, we have to be very strategic with every product decision we make. Roadmaps get updated, priorities change on a dime, and we need to be agile.

The following article is a collection of lessons I've learned the hard way. I hope this helps you approach product development a bit differently.

1. Designing and Building in a Silo

Talk to your users—make it a part of your process. Over-communication during product development never happens. Spend the time upfront to better understand the problem you are solving, and you'll end up ROI-positive. One effective way to make sure you are not designing and building in a silo is by conducting user interviews.

2. Operating as a Feature Factory

A solid Product Leader knows to focus on outcome, not output. If your team blindly ships features, you're setting yourself up for failure. Build, measure, and iterate. Do the homework upfront to properly scope before touching code.

Praising shipping is common, but it's not the right metric. Instead, praise the results of your product or feature. Define those results upfront using a framework like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to ensure your work impacts the business. Are you working on increasing retention? Increasing conversion? Have that conversation early and use it as a north star.

3. Solving Customer Problems with Features and Assumptions

Tech is fun! Ideas get designed, features get built, and if they don't work out, then it was something wrong with the implementation, right? Wrong.

Far too often, we start in the feature-building state instead of the problem-identifying state. A surefire way to get frustrated is to ask executives or colleagues what feature should be built:

"I read that company X released Y feature and their [insert metric] went up 400%! Let's get building!"

If resources are wasted, it's not the executives' or colleagues' fault, but rather the product leader's fault. A true product leader knows what is best for the user and reverts the conversation back to problem-solving.

Thanks for reading!

Also, thank you to Marty Cagan, author of Inspired—this book had a large influence on my actions as a product leader and is an amazing read.

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