What product quotes really mean to product managers
By: Robert Drury
Tags: Product Owner, Product, Product Management, Product Manager, Software Development

Lee Iacocca, former CEO in with Crysler and famed former Ford executive, is a great source of quotes.

“When the product is right, you don’t have to be a great Marketer”, is much like the Elon Musk quote that gets mentioned regularly — “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken” — in that it is intended to indicate the desire to reach the point where your product is just understood by your customers, without the need for further explanation.

There are many quotes that are rolled out in relation to product management, and in this post, we’ll take a look at a few of them and what they really mean and what is means for us product managers.

“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.”

As with many product quotes, this Seth Godin gem puts the customer at the centre of all operations, and for us as product managers we’re constantly reminded to understand the customer, listen to the customer, talk to the customer.

When a new product idea is generated it’s going to be based on the need of a customer. It will have come from some level of feedback from a user of a system, service, or product, that has led to the thought that ‘wouldn’t it be good if …’, and the product or feature idea is born. This is the ultimate finding of a product for your customer.

Over time though, when a product is a little longer in the tooth, there are opportunities for complacency within a business, and a transition happens where we move from finding products to finding customers. It’s subtle, and it happens over time, but the product starts to lose touch with its customer base (through a variety of factors from competition to a lack of investment), and instead of your customer being the focus and the products adjusting to meet their needs, the reverse starts to happen and we start chasing customers to buy our products.

The importance there is ensuring that we always keep our eye on the ball, or rather our eye on the customer, to ensure that our product is evolving to meet the needs of the customer.

“If you don’t sell, it’s not the product that’s wrong, it’s you.”

Estee Lauder, founder of the eponymous cosmetics brand, also finds herself with a popular quote related to the ‘pay attention to your customer’ category, but with a slice of “pay attention to your business practices” thrown in.

For her, it is the people that run the business that make or break the product, which when you see it written down like that is an obvious thing to say, however, we often package up many factors of a product’s success on to the product itself.

“The product is unreliable” is a direct result of decisions made to not focus on the reliability of the product, whether through product management or management strategy.

“The product doesn’t have the same features as its more successful competitor” is a direct result of the product team not being aware of the changing needs of the customer and competitive landscape.

“The product is too expensive compared to the rest of the market” is again the responsibility of the product team for not identifying the desire for cheaper alternatives, and for not working with the business to position the product in the right niche.

Being honest with ourselves is key, but once we’re honest we need to have an environment where we can freely share our opinions and often go against the status quo.

Product managers need to be prepared to say ‘no’, ‘that’s not what our customers want’ or ‘we need to pivot’ in order for the product to keep selling.

“I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something that motivates you.”

On the surface you could take this Jeff Bezos quotation and say that when we’re talking about missionaries we’re talking about people going out into the world and selling the product through persuasion and promotion, but that’s not what he’s referring to here.

Bezos is talking about internal missionaries. People within the business with an understanding of what they’re trying to achieve and importantly why they’re trying to achieve it.

Although Amazon started out as an online book retailer, it was always in Bezos’s mind that they were to be the online retailer of everything, and it’s this underlying core desire to be the number one retailer on the planet that drives the entire business to bigger and better things.

How many of us work in businesses where the core reason for being (or as Simon Sinek says ‘The why’) is so clear?

Once this core reason is there then you’ll be able to cultivate missionaries to make the products better, but without it, it is impossible to have such focus and belief in the product. What are you believing in?

You can’t believe in ‘people messaging each other’ or ‘flinging birds at pigs’. They aren’t reasons to get out of bed.

“Most businesses think that product is the most important thing, but without great leadership, mission and a team that deliver results at a high level, even the best product won’t make a company successful.”

Robert Kiyosaki takes the underlying truth to the missionaries quote and focuses in on the things that make great products possible, and this is often the overlooked part of being a great product manager.

Product managers do not create the most amazing ideas or find the best solutions, they lead people through a process that can deliver great results.

PMs are not an island. We can’t deliver anything without those around us, and if we don’t take our teams with us, then what we hope to achieve simply won’t be possible.

“Product management really is the fusion between technology, what engineers do and the business side.”

Finally, the last word goes to former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who puts product managers firmly in the middle of the business, between engineers and ‘the business’, which is a version of the familiar Martin Eriksson venn diagram.

In most of the smaller businesses that I’ve operated in, the product team literally sit in the middle of the business, halfway between the techies and the non-techies. This location puts you in the middle of all the conversations that you need to be part of, as you translate the needs and the solutions across all parties.

As businesses get larger, and physical centrality might not be possible, it then becomes the job of the PM to visit the teams regularly and rely messages, instructions, feedback, and ideas across the business. The PMs can direct the activities that lead to the delivery of a great product, which requires huge amounts of understanding and communication skill.

Conclusion

It doesn’t matter what the product related quote is, they’re all focusing on the main core points:

Listen to all your customers, both happy and unhappy

Know the reason for your business to exist and deliver on this

Be the conduit for information across all parties

If you can do this, then you’ll be a successful PM.

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About Rob

Rob was a footballer, cinema manager and recruitment consultant before getting in to software products. He’s been looking after products and hiring product teams for 20+ years, is currently product owner at luxury watch retailer Watchfinder and writes about how those who want to get into product can go about doing so.