成人论坛

As a product manager you often find yourself knee deep in the intricacies of your product, its failure or success and the hurdles you have to leap, before you have time to take a breath and reflect.

Following an intense nine months of doing just that on a new project for the 成人论坛 Academy, I finally found that moment of reflection when I attended the in Birmingham - a conference for the ‘product tribe’ of the West Midlands. With presentations from product managers from some of the world’s top companies, you couldn’t help but be inspired and wonder what their often tortuous experiences meant for your own world.

So what did I learn?

The theme of the day was experimentation: the importance of truly testing your assumptions, putting yourself into a ‘beginner’s mindset’, observing your users and using data to drive your product forward. 

So Netflix’s s eloquent summation of this told us that “thinking of product development as a series of experiments leads to stronger product designs”.

Where’s the inspiration in that you ask? We product managers already know this - we know we have to research, to test, to experiment in order to create great products. But ask yourself this: how often do you get stuck in the quagmire of subjective opinion, of tests which were flawed or designed to prove your assumptions or intuitions without really, truly experimenting with your product? 

from Skyscanner (above) promoted the importance of being impartial and sensible with your experiments - tests need to be trustworthy in order to get robust results. Skyscanner brings this to life with two core principles: design like you’re right and test like you’re wrong. Essentially, take your hypothesis, shut away your confirmation bias, and use your critical thinking to design and run experiments which will inevitably lead to vastly improved product iterations. Skycanner have summed this up nicely about their approach to experimenting.

And what about that ‘beginner’s mindset’? It occurred to me while listening to both from Spotify and from Slack, that as product managers we are often so excited about our innovations and proving our hypotheses that we forget to put ourselves back into the mindset of a beginner.

By mindset I don’t just mean thinking about a new feature or iteration from the perspective of one of your personas (user types that we imagine for the purpose of designing features) but actually putting yourself in a person’s mindset - pretending to be them. This is something which is ingrained into the culture at Slack, as Merci Victoria Grace explained it. 

Merci may have joked about watching your parents or grandparents trying to use Facebook and trying to search using the posts box, but she’s absolutely right - they are beginners! Dziuk alluded to this when he talked about creating their latest innovation: playlists with music which plays to the tempo of your run. Whilst developing this great innovation he never expected that users wouldn’t understand the instruction to “set your tempo” – but they didn’t.

So to make brilliant products, we really do need to put ourselves in the mindset of those beginners. Deep down we know this, but how often do we act upon it? Slack’s mantra wouldn’t be out of place in any organisation:

1. Pretend you are a human being!

2. Choose a part of your product and try to use it without understanding it.

3. Ask yourself: If I didn’t know what ‘X’ was, would this make any sense to me?

4. As this user, do you have enough information to make a decision?

The whole conference gave me the time and space to reflect on the experience of others. For my product, that reflection will fuel me to challenge ideas from that beginner’s mindset, be critical in the testing, experiment more and as a consequence move subjective opinions out of the picture.