EP32: What if We're Bad at Product Management?

Product management isn’t easy. And the reality is some founders just aren’t that good at it. 

In this episode, Asia Orangio, CEO of DemandMaven, discusses the importance of effective product management in growth and why striving for 'quality of life improvements' - small tweaks to existing features - over 'value generators' - hurts growth. 

If you haven't seen it, check out The Work, a weekly newsletter: https://demandmaven.substack.com/

Timeline: 

1:33 - Product management is ultimately the process of determining and prioritizing what features to build, what value to provide and deciding how to actually get that done. It is not order taking.

5:00 - Customers are not good at telling you what to build or why they want you to build something. If you are just approaching product management as taking orders from your customers you will often be led astray.

6:40 - Customers are usually in a solution space, as a great p roduct manager you need to get in the problem space (build a car and not a faster horse).

10:30 - Asking your customers "why?" can lead you to ideas for better solutions to their problems. Instead of just building features based on a customer request, ask "What is it that you're trying to accomplish? What does that help you do?"

13:00 - When you are too focused on the solutions space you build quality of life improvements, but not value generators.

16:00 - If you only make quality of life improvements, customers will eventually leave for another product that has more impactful value generators.

23:30 - If you have a revenue cohort retention rate of 40-70% the reason is likely related to your product and it is a key signal to start thinking about your product management.

26:45 - Recomendations for product management: Reforge, Continous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, Escaping The Build Trap by Melissa Perry