A product management blog by Jock Busuttil
This is not the Field of Dreams and you’re not Kevin Costner. If you build it, the users will not come – unless they have a strong motivation to do so.
A London startup is attempting to disrupt the local property rentals market in a way that benefits tenants, landlords and property agents equally – a win-win-win scenario, you might say. Jock Busuttil finds out more from the man in the Wigwamm, Rayhan Rafiq Omar.
After my slightly frivolous post last time, I wanted to follow up with a more practical article intended for people wanting to hire a product manager and, by the same token, those of you wanting to step into that role.
Does your sales team sell your products (like, in exchange for money), or does it give them away as generous sweeteners to guarantee the sale of something else that will hit their targets? Or to put it in another way, does your salesforce truly understand the value of your products and can it articulate the benefits to the customer?
There are many reasons why Sales may be holding back on your new product. As we all know, Salespeople are by nature shy, retiring types, who need constant reassurance. You need to encourage and nurture them, delicate little flowers that they are. Or at the very least, restrain the urge to run screaming at them with a baseball bat held aloft.
Your developers may be happiest when they’re hacking gnarly code, leaving you to get on with engaging with the market, but this doesn’t mean you can ignore their need for context – the ‘why’ of their project.
There are many questions that a product manager needs to ask to determine the best course of action or to analyse underlying motivations. Of them, I use the following three questions most often:
1. So what?
2. Why?
3. What’s stopping us?