Inspiring Quotes

“Everybody’s communication style is different. The more you can take the time to learn about the specific people on your team and appreciate their individual communication styles, the better you can facilitate communication for your team and your organization.”

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

“A launch plan should touch every single aspect of the 'whole product customer experience,' where 'whole' and 'customer' should be considered in the broadest way possible.”

“Customers are who we build our apps for, so we want to give them what they want and need, while empathizing with their struggles and frustrations. For me it’s not necessarily the mantra of the customer is always right, but do everything with the customer in mind.”

“Product is all about continuous learning.”

"Product management is a job of influence, not authority."

"Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

"Spend the vast majority of your energy ensuring you got the defaults in your product experience right. Never use 'but we added an option…' as a crutch. Only power users use options."

“The utmost thing is the user experience, to have the most useful experience.”

"The value isn't in your roadmap, the value is in the roadmapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problems that you're solving. So you're saying, 'I think we have this problem, then this problem. What do you think?' The whole point is that you just share your early assumptions with other people on the team, with customers, even, like anybody who will listen and just check that you're on the right path."

"Move away from output to outcomes."

“The best prioritization happens when it’s not driven by one person, one idea, or one perspective on the product. No one is as smart as all of us.”

“Prioritizing solutions is a left-over side effect of being output focused. When we are judged by what we deliver, the key decisions are focused on what to build when. But when we are judged by what outcomes we drive, it’s less about what solutions we deliver and more about what problems we solve for our customers. Product teams should stop prioritizing solutions and instead prioritize opportunities.”

“Good prioritization is based on cold, hard facts. When you have data and you have a clear strategy, prioritization becomes easy.”

“If you ask why enough times, eventually you’ll work it out and get to the root cause.”

"Too often we wait too long to ship because we want something to be perfect. We’ll pre-optimize a product before launch when it’s cheaper and more effective to post-optimize (as in optimize after launch with real user feedback and data)."

“If you continue to improve a product enough, you’ll eventually ruin it.”

"Product management is about insights and judgment, both of which require a sharp mind. Hard work is also necessary, but for this job, it is not sufficient."

"A great product manager has the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat."

"Product management is the art of creating something people love and then figuring out how to make money from it."

“Product managers are the connection between customers and the engineers who build the product. You are a bridge between what customers say and what the organization actually builds. You sit at the epicenter of everyone in your organization who builds, markets, sells, and supports your product. You explain what engineering is building to the people in sales and support. You interact with legal. You interact with finance. You are the ambassador for your products inside and outside the company. You are everything.”

"A product roadmap is a living, breathing document that evolves as the needs of your customers and the market change."

"A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop."

“Roadmaps are evidence of strategy. Not a list of features.”

"Be stubborn on vision but flexible on details.

“Great product teams are able to strike the right balance between building the right thing, building it right, and building it fast. Prioritization frameworks can be a reliable way to do that over and over again, at scale.”

“I leverage my knowledge of our business and customers to better prioritize what features make it onto the roadmap and help my team understand why we’re building those features.”

“The product manager needs to map the product strategy down to the individual features, and prioritize them in the right order across product development stages so as to maximize the winnings. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

"As a PM, it's really easy for stakeholder communication to become an afterthought – something that you do after your "real" work is done. But it's so key! Get in the habit of keeping stakeholders in the loop early & often, and you'll make your own job (& theirs) so much easier.

"Keep things simple. Only use artifacts that help the Scrum team move closer to a shippable product.”

"Hard decisions make great products. Your job is not to carve the safe route. Your job is to increase the probability that you’ll be delighting millions of users in a sustainable fashion."

“Although many people are drawn to product management by the promise of “building products that people love,” the day-to-day practice of product management involves much less actual building than it does supporting, facilitating, and communicating.”

“Quite simply, it’s the product manager’s job to articulate two simple things: What game are we playing? How do we keep score?”

“In most cases, having and using a fantastic machine learning algorithm is less important than deploying a well-designed user experience (UX) for your products.”

"In product strategy, I focus a lot on delighting customers in hard to copy, margin-enhancing ways."

"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better."

"Your product roadmap is the prototype for your strategy. It’s your key to vision alignment. It’s your ever-adaptable communication aid, the one thing your team can coalesce around and use as a North Star guiding light."

"The product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused."

“The biggest product management challenge is resource alignment. Team sizes are always changing and frequently lopsided. Some weeks you have plenty of design bandwidth and no iOS, others you have no design and all iOS. Having a deep backlog of well prioritized projects is key to operating an efficient team.”

“Bad prioritization is an excellent way to kill your startup.”

“Methods of product prioritization should not be used to replace human decision-making. A good structure is a way to get everyone on the same page when it comes to the product’s overall goals. Prioritization approaches are exercises in weighing the numerous options available for any given feature or concept.”