The Three Principles of Product Success
Last spring, I found myself suddenly unemployed during the pandemic.
Escaping from the city, I spent 10 weeks applying to and interviewing for product management roles from the eerie familiarity of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the suburbs. As I researched each of my potential new products, I aspired to learn what made each one competitive, special and successful. Through this research across all different types of products, I learned that product success hinges on three core principles.
1. Your Product Must be Essential
The average adult makes 35,000 decisions per day. What drives these decisions? Fundamentally, each decision you make is designed to pursue a solution to a problem. Let’s say you wake up in the middle of the night uncomfortably cold. What do you do? You could wrap a nearby blanket around you and hope you warm up, you could get up and find socks in the nearby dresser, or you could go all the way downstairs and turn up the thermostat. Whichever decision you make, you are pursuing a solution to the problem of being too cold to sleep.
Now, if you’re a product manager, what product or service could you offer to solve this problem? Perhaps a heated comforter, thermal socks or a phone app that can adjust the temperature with a few taps. All three of these…
