Syed Hadi’s Post

5 best pieces of advice I have received about being a product manager: 1/ Make the engineers famous. Give them the credit they deserve. Make sure the company knows, the internet knows, everyone knows!! It's not about you, it's about the product and team. 2/ Ship small wins asap in your new job. This builds trust, shows that you get things done. Even if it's just small things, quick small wins lead to bigger wins later. 3/ Proactively update sales and support. This is an underrated one. Taking the time to make sure sales and support are setup to successfully support any new feature goes a long way. 4/ Close the loop! After a feature launch, share the impact of the launch with the engineers # of new users? $? Happy user reviews? This builds trust that when you ask the team to crunch, it’s for a good reason. Everyone wants to know why they're working on something. (Also tell your users who requested the feature and they'll be super happy!!!) 5/ Be the person who cares the most. Nothing is more demoralizing than working on something and feeling like no one cares. Before a feature has users, be the top power user of the feature. Be so invested in every change. Be the person that cares before the world gets to.

This excerpt from Marty Cagan right here, is the reason why the Product Manager job is the most difficult in the product team. Don't be deluded by the hypes you see on social media. It demands a broad capacity: "I always like to discuss the four key risks in product development: value, usability, feasibility, and viability. The product manager is primarily responsible for viability. This is their main focus—ensuring that the solution works for various parts of the company. Think about it: who else on the product team knows whether the product can be marketed by marketing, sold by sales, funded by finance, monetized by the company, or whether it's compliant and legal? Do you think the designers have time for that? They have a huge job of their own, which we'll talk about next, but it isn't that. And the engineers? Definitely not. Their job is big, but it’s not about viability either. This responsibility falls to the product manager. One of the most challenging aspects of being a product manager is learning enough about the entire business to represent all these constraints, ensuring that everything built is viable."

Let's not kid ourselves... As a product manager, you are not only responsible for bringing innovative products to the market, but ensuring that these products solve the problems of real users. No pressure... right? 😳 We know from working closely with our customers that this is no easy task. To help you succeed in your role, here are 5 DOs and DON'Ts of product management: 👎 DON’Ts: 1. Ignore competition. Understand what they do and how they solve YOUR users' problems so you can identify the gaps in the market - Differentiation is the key to success. 2. Set unrealistic goals. Avoid disappointment and empower your team and stakeholders. 3. Micromanagement. Don't do it, it's a waste of everyone's time. 4. Stay true to your idea. Don't fall in love with your ideas, test what resonates with users. 5. Lose sight of the North Star. Always align product decisions with the company's goals. 👍 DOs: 1. Understand who you are developing the product for by spending time with your users, gathering feedback and basing your product decisions on this. 2. Define clear, measurable goals for your product that align with the company's objectives. This will help you stay focused and track progress over time. 3 Communicate effectively with your team and stakeholders. 4. Use data such as customer feedback, behavioural data and market trends to make product decisions. 5. Test and conduct continuous discovery. The best products are not created overnight. What do you do?

I have learned that bringing a product from an idea to the market and ensuring its success as a product manager involves three key phases: Discovery, Delivery, and Distribution. Discovery: This phase is about identifying the right product to build. Through thorough research, it involves understanding user needs, market gaps, and opportunities. Delivery: This is the process of building the product and turning ideas into something tangible. It involves design, development, and quality assurance to ensure the product is built correctly. Distribution: This phase focuses on delivering the product to the market and ensuring it reaches the right users. It involves go-to-market strategies, marketing, and customer acquisition efforts. These three phases work together to achieve the following objectives: ✍ Building the right product that solves real problems and meets user needs. ✍ Building the product right by ensuring high quality and functionality. ✍ Ensuring the product reaches the right users through effective distribution. Discovery plays the most critical role, as it lays a solid foundation for product success. Research is at the heart of Discovery, making it safe to say that a product manager must excel as a researcher. #productmanagement #discovery #delivery #distribution #productmanager #PMactivities #PMengagements

have you ever found yourself in the midst of many hats? yes -- you might need to find yourself in the middle of a related task in order to ensure the success of a product maybe I should say, that you would not have earned the status of product manager without the success of the specific managed product. - Ensure product leads to customer satisfaction - Proper management of the product based on time and resource - Conducting thorough market research and analyzing data to understand customer needs -Collaborate with teams across departments such as engineering, design, marketing, and sales to ensure alignment and successful product development. - Effectively communicate with stakeholders both internal and external. In truth, the path to becoming a product manager is closely linked to the triumph of the products you oversee. It's about skillfully wearing various hats, all aimed at creating top-notch products that connect with customers and boost business growth. is a new month of MAY -- may we continue to build a successful product - being successful mean your product truly solves business needs and customer pain point -- HAPPY WORKERS DAYS AND HAPPY NEW MONTH #happynewmonth #productmanagement #productsuccess

Once upon a time, “product first” was supposed to be about how to best deliver products and features to best serve customers. After all, if we’re not serving customers well, what are we doing? But somewhere along the way, the focus shifted; the meaning morphed into prioritizing the product itself, often at the expense of user needs. Now, Product first = business first While capturing value for the business is essential. Here lies the problem: ▪️ We reverse engineer use cases; building features in hopes someone will find a use for them, instead of starting with user needs. ▪️ We’re sure we really know our customers, so we didn’t bother researching people, tasks, or their decisions. ▪️Focusing on solutions, not problems: We often ask customers about features, forgetting that they primarily care about completing tasks efficiently and accurately. While they might be open to features that achieve this, they may not be able to envision the specific solution themselves. We fell so in love with the product itself that we forget that the main job of a product is to win, satisfy, and retain customers. If we are not doing those well, we are fundamentally failing as Product managers.

When I interview or talk to product managers, many think about only a third of the job. They focus primarily on working with developers, building features, and improving the product. Excelling at this aspect of the job ensures you get the product out, but it misses the point of being a product manager. While building the product is a vital part of the job, two aspects are just as important, if not more: 1. Knowing your customer and market Spending time with customers - buyers and users - is the key to unlocking success as a product manager. Finding opportunities to meet customers, asking good questions, and listening are the superpowers that separate real product people. 2. Positioning your product to enable sales Positioning is what converts this knowledge of the customer into tangible results. Building the technology/product is the easy part. Figuring out where and how to communicate your vision to the market creates tangible results. Do these two things well and creating winning products becomes possible.

3 truths and 1 lie about product management. Spot the lie....... ~ Product Managers often act as the bridge between different departments, such as engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support, to ensure a cohesive product strategy. ~ Product Managers have the final say on all decisions regarding the product, including design, feature set, and pricing. ~ A significant part of a Product Manager's role is to understand customer needs and pain points and translate them into actionable product features and improvements. ~ Product Managers are responsible for the entire lifecycle of a product, from initial concept and development through launch and post-launch support. If you have been following my post for a while, I am sure it would be very easy for you to detect the lie. I will be in the comment section, waiting for your replies. #SandraStrategies

Every product manager has faced it: A senior executive walks in and says, "We need (random feature I was talking about with my neighbor yesterday)". But here’s the problem: starting with solutions skips the most important step. Understanding the problem. Instead of just saying “yes” or “no,” ask: 1. What user problem are we solving? 2. Why is this a priority now? 3. How will we measure success? When you focus on problems, not pre-baked solutions, you discover more impactful opportunities, while also avoiding shipping features no one uses. The goal isn’t delivering features. It’s delivering value.

As a product manager, your job requires you to become a practitioner of deep thinking, you need to analyze all the scenarios, hidden problems, potential risks and how you can prioritize or mitigate them. The problem comes when you have to convince others and get their buy-in, most of the time things that matter to you the most are the ones you have spent most time thinking. But essentially that never is the case with the other person, they have their own thoughts and their priorities. In such a scenario it becomes crucial to know what to communicate, what things matter to others & how much, and make sure that there is as little noise as possible so that the highlights don't get missed out in details. "Think in paras, communicate in Bullets"