Week 93 - 5 Common Mistakes Product Managers Make 🙅♂️
Quote
“The most successful products are the ones that solve real user problems in a simple and intuitive way”
Poll
💯 Framework // Concept // Mental Model
Product management is a challenging and multifaceted role that requires juggling many responsibilities - from understanding customer needs, to defining product vision and roadmaps, to working with engineering to ship features. With so many balls in the air, it's no surprise that even the best product managers can sometimes drop one.
To help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls, here are 5 mistakes that product managers frequently make, along with real-world examples and tips on what to do instead:
1. Chasing Shiny Objects vs. Solving Real Problems 🪄
One of the biggest temptations for product managers is to get distracted by the latest technology trends, design fads, or seemingly brilliant feature ideas. In the excitement to innovate and differentiate their products, PMs can lose sight of the most fundamental question: "What problem are we solving for our users?" Chasing shiny objects often stems from a desire to be cutting-edge and impress stakeholders or customers with flashy new capabilities. But building products that don't address real user needs is a surefire path to irrelevance. If you can't clearly articulate the user problem you're solving and how your product uniquely addresses it, you're likely chasing the wrong things.
Consider Google Glass - Google's much-hyped smart glasses that enabled users to take photos, get directions, and view notifications all from a head-mounted display. Google thought the technology was cool and poured resources into developing it. The problem? Most consumers simply didn't need or want a face computer. Lacking a clear use case or target audience, Google Glass flopped and was discontinued for consumers in 2015, less than 2 years after launch.
The key takeaway is to stay laser-focused on understanding and solving your users' underlying needs and pain points. Validate demand for new product ideas through user research, data analysis, and experimentation before investing heavily in them. Continually ask yourself, "Is this product or feature essential for delivering user value, or just a cool nice-to-have?" Be rigorous about ensuring your product roadmap aligns with real customer problems, not just trends or personal interests.
2. Designing for the PM vs. the User 🙋♂️
Another frequent misstep PMs make is crafting product experiences that cater to their own preferences and assumptions vs. those of their target users. As a product expert who spends their days deeply immersed in the product, it's easy to develop an inflated sense of how much users understand about the product's features, architecture and lingo. What seems like an intuitive interaction or copy to you may be utterly baffling to a new user. This mistake often arises when PMs don't spend enough time directly interacting with customers "in the wild" to understand their real-world context, behaviors, and expectations. Relying too heavily on second-hand user insights like usage metrics or feature requests filtered through customer support and sales teams can also contribute to a skewed view of user needs.
To avoid this, develop deep empathy for your users through research and frequent interaction:
Interview customers regularly to understand their context, behaviors, and mental models
Observe how people actually use your product through user testing and analytics
Dogfood your own product to uncover points of confusion or friction
Use these insights to continually gut check whether design and functionality decisions will make sense for your core audience vs. just your product team.
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3. Underinvesting in Onboarding 🤔
So you've built a product that solves a real user need - congratulations! But the job isn't done once you've acquired the user. To turn them into an engaged, long-term customer, you need to effectively onboard them and help them quickly experience the value of your product. A common PM mistake is focusing so much on user acquisition that you neglect putting real thought and effort into the critical first-run experience. This often happens because activation metrics like completion of key onboarding actions are less visible and celebrated than acquisition metrics like signups or downloads. It's easy for PMs to adopt a "if we build it, they will come (and figure out how to use it)" mentality. But in today's competitive market where users are quick to churn, you can't afford to simply drop new users into your product and hope they discover the value themselves.
Consider a fictional mobile app called "FitLife" that helps users track their workouts and nutrition. The FitLife team spends months developing a comprehensive set of features, including personalized meal plans, workout routines, and progress tracking. However, when the app launches, the onboarding process consists of a simple welcome screen and a brief tutorial that doesn't fully explain how to use the app's features. Many users struggle to navigate the app and fail to see the value in using it consistently. As a result, FitLife sees high user churn rates and low engagement, despite having a feature-rich product.
To nail your onboarding:
Map out key activation milestones users need to hit to find value and stick around
Progressively guide users through your most important features as they reach each milestone
Provide in-context help and human support to preempt frustration and drop-off
Continually monitor activation rates and drop-off points to optimize the new user experience
4. Overstuffing vs. Simplifying 🍱
Another common PM pitfall is the temptation to continuously cram more features and options into the product in an attempt to satisfy every user request and use case. This often comes from a good place of wanting to be responsive to customer feedback and cover all your bases. However, the result tends to be a bloated, overcomplicated product that ironically serves no one particularly well. This mistake often takes root when PMs have an "all things to all people" mindset, striving to make their product a one-stop-shop that single-handedly meets the full spectrum of user needs in a particular domain. In an attempt to differentiate from competitors, PMs can also fall into a feature arms race, matching them bell-for-bell and whistle-for-whistle. But an overloaded product is more likely to stifle user engagement than encourage it.
Picture a customer relationship management (CRM) platform called "SalesPro" that starts out as a simple tool for managing sales contacts and deals. As SalesPro grows, the product manager decides to add more features to keep up with competitors and satisfy requests from enterprise clients. They introduce complex reporting tools, marketing automation capabilities, and a built-in chat function. However, as more features are added, SalesPro becomes slower, harder to navigate, and less intuitive for users. Many of the platform's core users, who are small to medium-sized businesses, find the new features overwhelming and start looking for simpler, more focused alternatives.
To avoid this fate, be judicious about what you add to your product:
Continually re-evaluate whether older features still deliver meaningful user value and business impact. Be willing to deprecate or streamline them if not.
When considering new features, carefully weigh the user benefit vs. the added product complexity. Optimize for quick, contextual interactions over cramming pages with every conceivable option.
Explore alternative delivery mechanisms like bots, integrations, and web apps vs. overloading your core product UI.
5. Launching and Leaving vs. Iterating 🚀
Finally, one of the most pernicious product management mistakes is viewing launches as the end of the product development journey rather than the beginning. PMs often pour their blood, sweat and tears into getting a new product or major feature out the door. When it finally launches, there's a huge temptation to check it off as "done", high five, and move on to the next big thing. This often stems from having an output-focused vs. outcome-focused mentality. Defining success as shipping the thing you spec'ed rather than achieving the user and business goals you set out to impact. It's fueled by organization incentives that tend to celebrate new launches more than ongoing optimizations. And it's exacerbated by the pressure PMs face to continually deliver a "drumbeat" of releases and show progress against roadmaps.
Imagine a social media management platform called "SocialHub" that launches a new feature allowing users to schedule and publish posts across multiple social networks simultaneously. The feature generates buzz and attracts new users, but the SocialHub team quickly moves on to developing other features without gathering user feedback or monitoring usage data. After a few weeks, they notice that engagement with the new feature is low and that many users are encountering bugs and compatibility issues with certain social networks. By failing to iterate and improve the feature based on real-world usage, SocialHub misses an opportunity to create a truly valuable and sticky product offering.
To set your product up for long-term success:
Treat launches as the starting line, not the finish line. Plan and resource post-launch optimization and iteration from the get-go.
Define success metrics and actively monitor them post-launch. Dig into user feedback and engagement data to understand what's working vs. not.
Be prepared to make changes big and small based on what you learn, from UX tweaks to pivots in product direction.
Operate with a growth mindset. View your job as ongoing product improvement, not just shipping new stuff.
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