Product Collective - 📂 Data in Product Management

What Product Managers need to know about data

If you’ve ever tried to understand your product’s current situation to figure out where to go next, you understand the importance of data. When you know how to collect, manage and analyze data about your customers, your market, and your product, you’re well positioned to make informed decisions. Check out these resources to find out what you need to know about working with data, even if you aren’t a Data Product Manager. 

Data for Product Managers. Today, being user-centric isn’t enough for product managers. In modern digital product management, a data-driven mindset is required to make the right decisions and align stakeholders. Artificial intelligence is also ubiquitous in digital products of our daily life. All top companies now extensively use data and follow various metrics to monitor performance, improve products, and increase business value. Arnaud Dessein outlines the background on data to improve your skills and navigate this context with ease.
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SQL for Product Managers. Product Management revolves around deciding and making bets. Having solid data to back your conjectures will often yield better outcomes and help counter your biases or omissions. To get that solid data, Muhammad Irtiza has found that proficiency in data querying (SQL) is important. If you want to decide on the go, you can always query the relevant data in a matter of minutes instead of relying on your data team to view and respond to your request. Knowing the data for your product helps you understand your product better.
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Finish Strong
This past week, something happened that we’ve been anticipating for years. We finally were able to put on an in-person edition of INDUSTRY: The Product Conference.

This was the first time we’ve been able to put on our flagship conference since Fall 2019. Since that time, COVID, of course, struck and we had to go virtual with INDUSTRY ever since. While it’s been fun to learn an entirely new way to put on INDUSTRY – and we’ll continue to run virtual conferences and even have one planned on October 18th – it felt really good to gather hundreds of product people from nearly every US state with us this week for INDUSTRY. 

But I’ll be honest – it took nearly every ounce of energy we had to put INDUSTRY on. 

In the weeks leading up, we were thrown more curveballs than ever. Our celebrity keynote backed out less than a month beforehand along with several other speakers. Some attendees had to cancel travel and could no longer make it. At one point, it felt like things had the potential to unravel. 

But our team knew that letting things unravel wouldn’t be an option. We had to finish… and finish strong.

We quickly recruited new speakers – including SNL’s Mikey Day (who hung out with INDUSTRY attendees all night, even at the INDUSTRY party!). We came up with contingency plan after contingency plan. And ultimately… we did the thing. INDUSTRY 2022 ended up being one of our best conferences yet.

My takeaway from this entire week is this: No matter how much you’re struggling with any sort of product launch – and how hard things feel… you’ll never regret putting every ounce of energy into finishing strong. You’ll only feel as proud of yourself and your team as I do right now.

Each year we team up with our friends at Productboard to help define the state of modern software Product Management. The results are always illuminating and we want you to be a part of it.  We’ll summarize our findings in a comprehensive report that we’ll share with the whole community 🌍.

Plus, for your trouble, we're offering you a free ticket to the upcoming INDUSTRY Virtual: The Product Conference, taking place on October 18th ($99 value).

Why Product Managers should not be data driven. In today’s world of product development, it’s really easy to measure everything in your product—user behavior, feature adoption, conversion rates. With this comes the ability to track how changes to the product impact all of these metrics, not just anecdotally but with cold, hard data. Making product decisions based on data may lead in the extreme to a “data-driven” Product Manager, who bases product decisions on data as much as possible, and will try to set up quantifiable criteria for all product development. Instrumenting the product, collecting quantitative evidence, and setting up success criteria before launching product changes are all practices that Jens-Fabian Goetzmann highly recommends. However, going fully “data-driven” is a dead end. Jens-Fabian explains why.
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Key data skills for Product Managers. Data is at the heart of product management: from forming and validating hypotheses to designing and running experiments to measuring the impact of product changes and understanding the market dynamics. To find out more about the different aspects of data skills in product management, the Go Practice team spoke to experienced product managers from different companies and industries. 
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5 Ways data can help Product Managers overcome imposter syndrome. Product managers often battle with a sense of imposter syndrome because of their work, the environment they operate in, and the demands they must fulfill within their roles. Josh Roberts, Senior Product Manager, Heap, shares five ways in which focusing on and leveraging data can help product managers overcome feelings of self-doubt.
(via @SpiceworksNews)

How to Effectively Increase the Product Value (with Deepak Vittal)

Your product can mean different things to different customers. As a consequence there is no such thing as objective product value, at least when it comes to actually selling products.

Customers need to believe in your product enough to accept the price you’ve set for them.

However, the most important distinction between price and value is the fact that price is arbitrary and value is fundamental.

“Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” – Warren Buffet

In this discussion, we'll talk through all sorts of issues related to this, including how:
- You should constantly remind your customers about their intention and the goals they want to achieve when they pay for your product.
- Quantifying the value requires a deep understanding of the ultimate benefit for a customer.
- Differentiable value defines a unique solution to recognized challenges for a customer.
Plus, you'll get a chance to have questions of your own answered as well!

This webinar is brought to you by our friends at insightsoftware

How to Use Design Thinking as a Product Manager

It can be easy for Product Managers to hear the phrase "Design Thinking" — and assume that it's something that ought to be reserved for our colleagues working in design. But the reality is that even Product Managers who wouldn't describe themselves as "Designers" could really benefit from embracing Design Thinking. In this conversation, we'll dig into on why this is and how Product Managers can use Design Thinking for the benefit of themselves and their teams. Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own!

How delighting customers can go awry and what to do instead

We’ve learned that the key to building successful products is to iterate quickly and see what delights customers. Unfortunately, it turns out that chasing customer delight can lead to common product diseases and doesn’t guarantee a successful product.
In this discussion, the author of Radical Product Thinking will share concrete examples to illustrate how delighting customers can go awry and a radical approach to turn things around. Plus, you'll have a chance to ask questions of your own as well.

1. A newsletter each and every Friday centered around an important product topic, like roadmapping, strategy, and analytics.
2. Access to a thriving Slack group with thousands of others to share advice, tips and get feedback on your work.
3. Plus, invitations to exclusive video chats, special member privileges at the conferences we hold in the United States and Europe, and more!