Below Water Level

By now it should be clear to everyone that the age of capital abundance is over. Resources are going to be constrained and Product leadership will need to learn new skills and develop new muscles in order to accomplish business, customer, personal and professional goals.

The abundance of capital in the decade past encouraged habits which has led us to build everything and anything and all at the same time.

But, how we have operated as a function in the previous decade will not be how we operate in the coming years. Product Managers will not have carte blanche to build first and test later. Product Managers will not be absolved of profitability considerations. You will not get to make easy decisions that concern only operational imperatives.

In order to operate in the new era, Product Managers will need to ramp back up on strategy skills, with special focus on problem definition, value slicing, segmentation, value scoping. Furthermore, we’ll need to sharpen our skills to discriminate between options because you surely will not have the freedom of investing in every interesting feature.

In order to do that, PMs will need to go deep into understanding human and customer behaviour, and figure out where the struggles are. We’ll need to re-learn what it means to do real segmentation based on customer and human behaviour. We’ll need to wean our companies away from the easy path of “industry categories” gleaned from analyst reports, as a way to decide product scope. We’ll need to deeply understand the intensity of the customer problem and understand the value of addressing that problem to the customer. Such an investigation cannot happen in isolation but in the context of all the other struggles that the customer faces.

We’ll need to determine how addressing the problem impacts profitability. Does extending the product into new directions enhance or degrade profitability? Does it create downstream costs in training, awareness, onboarding, change management, operational tooling, etc. Does it dilute value prop for existing segments? Where does it fit into the categories-of-the-mind among customers?

Once the picture becomes clearer on all the above dimensions, then and only then might one be ready to choose. And yes, you have to choose. If you are thinking that you can slot everything on the roadmap and the roadmap will translates into resources. That’s not going to happen anymore. You will need to make some incredibly hard choices, from a set of options which all have the potential to result in a unicorn valuation.

That choice-making will truly test your skills, your self-regulation and your relationships.