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Things to Learn from Best Product Leaders
- Authors
- Name
- Ajitesh Abhishek
- @ajiteshleo
Things to learn from legends of product world - a running collection
The best builders in the world don't happen to be product managers. But that doesn't mean we (product managers) can't learn from these legends. It certainly will be a better use of time than reading most business books and definitely books on product management.
That led me to collect nuggets of wisdom from the best builders in the world in this blog. This blog of course will start small with handful of nuggets, but I expect to add more with time as I come across new ones and you (the readers) point to me 🙂
I will also put comments from my side to provide context and explain to myself, which may or may not be useful to you, so worth noticing or ignoring accordingly.
Ps: It may come across in my blog that I don't like being PM, but I do love it. But I don't like the extra glamor and credit this role gets at times. In my opinion, the closest analogies for us, Product Managers, are somewhere between neutrinos and dark matter: always around, allegedly doing something vital, but hard to pin down with any certainty.
1: Sam Altman: Always keep momentum
Sam Altman discussed this in the context of startups. However, having done startup and built products in Big Tech, I feel it applies well to later as well. Momentum can solve many problems within a team, such as obtaining headcounts and keeping people motivated.
One effective way to achieve this is to "always be (c)shipping," which I refer to as "ABC" for product management. This is especially critical in the B2B world, where waiting two years to ship can be disastrous for many reasons, including team promotions, attracting sales attention, generating interest, and more.
Recently, I came across "heartbeat framework" on this from Resend Cofounder - Zeno Rocha.
"How did your startup grow so fast?" I've been getting that question a lot, and I believe it comes down to a single word: momentum. We tried to codify momentum and came up with a new concept called... The Heartbeat Framework
2. Patrick Collison: Micro-pessimism, macro-optimism
I came across this from friend and AppBrew CEO, Abhijeet who showed 10 product rules his startup adheres. One of the top ones there was "Micro-pessimism, macro-optimism". It instantly clicked with me, as I had been struggling with this duality that our product is bad now but there is hope, and I want to give 200% to it.
Since then it has been one of the helpful product philosophy that I try to live by. I simply call it - "short-term pessimist, long-term optimist".
You need some paranoia to move things in short-term and make things constantly better. But you also need to motivate stakeholder (team, leadership, investors etc) of long-term potential and stay hopeful, and this philosophy helps me get that balance right.
3. Steve Jobs: It's not demos but incredible customer benefit
It's easy to get distracted when building products - add a new scroll, new language support, or completely new feature. On the similar lines, it's easy to build cool demos for most (especially those AI demos).
But that doesn't mean it's right product things to do. Does it offer incredible customer benefit that competition just doesn't match? That is the question we need to ask ourselves.
4. Jensen Huang: Play the long game
This talk from Jensen Huang is a good reminder that great things in product takes time. Some prducts indeed skyrocket really fast, but in most it's not linear, quick path.
And we have to prepare for the avg case. That means being patient and have defined, meaningful milestone to keep things going wile aiming for killed product in the long term.