As you continue to gain experience with your product, you will find that the most important core competency of your product is judgment. Advanced products consciously engage in intensive project practice, continuously input objective insights into users, and iterate on their own judgment.
Why is judgment the most important core competency of a product?
In the company, product managers should try their best to meet the pain points of users’ needs and bring them pleasant experience under the circumstances of lack of resources and unclear paths, so as to achieve the company’s goals and constantly improve the company’s competitive strength and social value. Thus, the product manager is a real face of all kinds of uncertain factors, looking for a certain path pathfinder.
As described above, we encounter a variety of uncertainties, such as the familiar scenario below:
- Your boss and colleague suddenly threw out a screenshot of a competing product’s function. They thought the experience was very good and asked you to follow up
- The designer has made three sets of visual schemes for you as party A, and let you choose and see if there is any problem
- To improve a metric, there are two models, and you need to evaluate ROI and validate that one
- After user feedback, you should evaluate the decision if and when to make it
- This is a solution you told the developer you were sure would improve by 80%… Is it sure?
At this time, your judgment is strong or weak, in fact, reflects the quality of your decision. As a result, the probability of success will be gradually increased with the accumulation of flowers’ applause and trust. Failure, the consumption of your trust value, your authority is weakened, and then “implicit” reduced resource investment, the probability of success is gradually reduced;
As you study hard, you accumulate an Arsenal of skills and methods, and learn to use different ways of thinking, you are improving your judgment. It is your “food ticket” to buy more necessary “resources” later on.
Judgment accumulates throughout a product career
Although the core tasks of product managers vary according to their working years:
1-3 Early stage products: Develop good working habits, accumulate relevant knowledge, master hard product skills, and ensure high quality delivery of assigned work;
3-6 years advanced products: In-depth study of a project and business, so as to improve product architecture, master and practice important ways of thinking, and achieve successful results of product projects;
6 years or more of product driver: to specific business and commercial ecological operation, constantly improve their global insight, help enterprises to stabilize the core competitiveness, continue to improve the social value;
But the accumulation of judgment begins when you start solving product problems:
The moment you become a product manager, every product problem you encounter repeats the following cycle over and over again, so to speak, throughout your product career.
High section of the product is nothing more than a solid foundation + high quality judgment. In the practice of the project again and again the success and failure of the review summary, continue to accumulate insights on users to enhance product judgment, continue to optimize the “question – hypothesis scheme – verification scheme” positive cycle.
It is believed that students reading products at this time will have significant differences with others in terms of confidence, authority and income in their subsequent product career through accumulated “practice” judgment.
What are the factors that affect product judgment?
User psychological
Understanding and grasping user psychology is very important and decisive to correctly judge the development trend of products. There are many factors that affect users, such as gender, age, nature of employment, economic conditions, cultural level, etc., but the most important thing is to capture the key interests of users, grasp the key interests basically grasp the psychology of people; We often say that product managers should have empathy, but in fact, it means that they should be good at understanding and understanding the psychology of users.
Practice experience
Generally speaking, the more types of products you make, the more people you work with, the more comfortable you will be with similar products. This is experience at work. Most experiences are accumulated by trial and error. There is a classic saying of a commentator of CCTV exploration program: They die out not because they fail too much, but because they try too little. Therefore, for young products to do not be afraid of making mistakes, pick up light afraid of heavy. However, it is important to manage the risk of making mistakes.
Experience method
Experience comes from their own or product predecessors’ practical experience, is the analysis of experience extraction, summary formed a certain operability, reusable methodology. Everyone’s time and energy is limited, can’t do everything by yourself to obtain direct experience, so learn more, ask more and think more indirectly to obtain the product manager, is also extremely important. It should be noted that the experience brought lacks the perceptual cognition of the parties involved, and in the process of operation, we may find that there is not enough agreement with things, which needs to be constantly corrected and adjusted in the process of practice.
The amount of information
Product managers themselves make all kinds of judgment decisions in the environment of various uncertain factors, if the lack of information, especially the lack of important information will lead to a high probability of wrong judgment. The greater the breadth and depth of information acquisition, the easier it is to get close to the essence of things. However, not all information is useful, and the decisive role is often a few. So when processing information, pay attention to false and true. To judge the value of information, we should pay attention to the identification of information sources, such as the report to the authority, uncertain information to find multi-channel verification and so on.
Docile thoughts
Yeah, distractions are also an important factor in judgment. Letting go of distractions actually allows us to focus and see things objectively. When I am not clear in my mind, I should actively seek the help of “external brain”, seek the opinions of my classmates or product predecessors, and absorb introspection.
How to improve my product judgment at work?
Combined with years of experience, simplified into 5 steps for reference:
- Review the accumulation of historical verification relevant to current events;
- Consult actively before judgment, check information, expand information;
- To determine the basis for the judgment of the current event and make a prediction;
- Practice validates judgment and compares differences to see what is missing in your judgment;
- Output summaries and your own insights
Not one to expand the explanation, carry three parts:
No matter how small a decision is, you should have your own prediction
For example, you have a product optimization plan that you expect to improve click-through rates. You can’t just say your goal is to increase CTR. You have to be bold and predict whether you can increase CTR by 5% or 10%. You have to have a clear outcome expectation. This prediction can come from your historical product validation experience, or from your control over the psychology of your users. In the absence of any information at all, you can even guess based on what you feel is possible, at least that’s your baseline, and the big rule is you can’t do without your own predictions.
Practice verifies results, contrasts and predicts differences
For example: Following the above example, you originally predicted that reason XX would have a strong interest incentive for users and would increase by 20%, but the verification result after practice turned out to be negative revenue. Don’t let this discourage you. This is a great time to learn and improve your judgment. If possible, you can sample user portraits, study differences in user behavior, and talk to actual users one-on-one to find out what the source of your error is.
Output conclusions and insights
The conclusion is the actual result of the verification of the scheme. Insight is the reason for this result, give your own objective analysis.
Finally want to say
The above, I hope to help and inspire your product work. This long-term accumulation of “practice” can eventually be applied not only to product work, but also to all aspects of your life. Take every decision you make seriously right now, and strive to continue gaining insight and judgment through steps like the one above.
Author: Gueng Xiaopeng, wechat official account: Full-time Product Manual (PathSource), welcome to exchange and study together.