Managed by Q fmr CEO on The Importance of Customer-Focused Product Management

We recently sat down with Managed by Q fmr CEO, Ron Feldman, to discuss how he found his way into product and the importance of customer-focused product management. He shared many great thoughts about product management and how important it is to keep everything customer-first. Listen to the entire episode right here on Products That count and roll through the highlights below.

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How do you find your way into product management?

Feldman dug into more detail on his episode of Product Talk, but he summed it up nicely with this quote.

“Be curious about everything. Have any desire to make the world better in both small ways and big ways,” says Feldman. “Actually having ideas and then wanting to make those ideas happen and come to life, which I think relates to being an entrepreneur, and also relates to being a product manager.”

Seriously, just take the challenge on yourself.

Sometimes, to be a great product manager you just have to be the hero that everyone needs.

“People ask me for advice on how to get into product management. What I say is that when I go into any company when I look out at the office, what I see virtually is that everywhere you look, there are literal balls dropping on the floor everywhere. There’s opportunity for anybody to go and say, I’m going to pick up a bunch of these balls and try to solve a particular problem.”

On customer-focused product management.

Be honest with yourself about your motivations.

“Constantly ask the question, how does this benefit the customer? I think that gets lost in many scenarios, where you get so far down a path of a particular feature or a product and somebody has some motivation that, again, tends to be something around a particular metric or increasing some particular thing. Always ask yourself the question, is this actually beneficial to the customer? If we’re adding five fields to a form because it helps with some sort of internal attribution or compensation or credit or something like that. Is it actually helping the customer or are we actually making the customer’s life harder to make something for ourselves easier? Are you solving problems for your customers, not doing things to your customers?”

Great products are customer-focused too.

There’s a reason why customers love great products. It’s because they’re made for them!

“I think that the only thing that makes a product great is if customers love it. It tends to be something that is incredibly easy to use, very reliable, solves a pain point. That is a critical point. And it does it in such a visceral way that it sparks emotion.”