Business and technology, the one function that needs to know the customers and the value we bring to them.
You are a Product Manager in a technology organization. Your life is exciting, dynamic and ever-changing. Usually you are busy moving from one task to another.
You are always focused, always busy. However, by constantly focusing on specific tasks you may actually lose one of your key roles as a Product Manager –watching the market!
This is about Product Management excellence. One position in the company that needs to look at the business andtechnology, the one function that needs to know the customers and the value we bring to them
Product Manager – Watch the Market!
You are a Product Manager in a technology organization. Your life is exciting, dynamic and ever-changing. Usually you are busy moving from one task to another. You are always focused, always busy. However, by constantly focusing on specific tasks you may actually lose one of your key roles as a Product Manager – watching the market! Dolphins
Product Managers should be like Dolphins* in order to make real progress you need to constantly go in and out of the water – watch this. When you are in the water you focus on delivering user stories and writing MRDs or getting on sales calls and answering RFPs, but it is a MUST for you to also spend time outside of the water where your vision is wider and you see things from a different perspective. Take a look at the market, new technologies, new industries and new ways for your customers to conduct business – All this will affect you, and if you stay underwater for too long you may miss your market!
* The original Product Manager Dolphin analogy was made by Adi Pundak-Mintz, a VC investor and formerly a Product Manager.
Awareness
Take a look at this before you continue reading!
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This little demonstration is based on an experiment by Christopher Chabris of Harvard University and Daniel Simons of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Fact: People focused on a specific task will not notice other obvious market trends. As one of the key responsibilities of the Product Manager is to be in touch with the market it is imperative that Product Managers keep time for listening to the market activities so they will notice the moonwalking bear (or the invisible gorilla as in the original experiment – see www.invisiblegorilla.com ).