15 Lessons Learned as a Product Manager05/03/2013

Suresh Krishna Madhuvarsu > www.sureshkrishna.com> www.linkedin.com/in/sureshmadhuvarsu

Remind your self about this fundamental building block everyday

Strive towards increasing the revenues; reducing the costs and increasing the profits.

Today’s cost has to yield >2x revenues or indirect positive effect. If not, something is wrong with today’s cost.

Sunk costs are important; don’t get stuck to past mistakes.

Know a dead horse; don’t feed it;

Everyone has a perspective on what should be done

Customers may not always be right; Also, they may not always be wrong.

Understand the user and buyer relationship

Understand the engineering, sales limitations

Collect quantitative and qualitative data about the market and customers

Gather the expert intelligence from the previous experiences

Balance between the data and intuition

…not tomorrow; not yesterday Set realistic expectations to

customers Don’t push quarterly targets too hard

on to sales If you sell future, you always need to

catch up

The cost of fixing a problem tomorrow is much more expensive than today

Don’t be lazy

Everyone is watching youYour market, customer and industry

knowledge brings in energy to other teams

Be positive

Human relation is much better than Email and Phone conversation

Take time to know everyone who is connected to the product

Networking is part of the job; it is an investment

You are smart; but customer is ALSO smart

Your story has more effect than your feature

Keep the story consistent

Test the hypothesis as early as possible; Fail early

If you plan for a feature make sure someone out there is ready to use it

If there is a feature that’s not profitable, don’t be afraid to prune

You are the owner of the productEvery thing starts at you and ends at

youDon’t pass the buck

…but should not drive your productSpend enough time to understand

the moves of the competitionYOUR vision should drive your

product with an ultimate goal of building products that customers love.

… with "no biases“The glue to the cross functional

teamsConduit of the information and data

flow

Everyday is different at workDon’t get deep into the tactical

work Don’t stop with Strategic workDo enough to balance the

important and urgent tasks

…and smart peopleThere are lots of things going on and

being happy helpsBeing funny or humorous helps