hi, Anthony here! In this newsletter, I curate insights on how to build great products. You’ll improve your product skills with every issue.

Let’s get to it.

The 5 Ps of Product Management

Insight from Alex Reeve, product leader at Coinbase!

Purpose

All great products start with a purpose. Without a purpose, a company is flying blind, and having a clear and compelling mission and strategy inspires a product team and points discovery efforts in the right direction.

• Mission - what you’re trying to accomplish, concise, opinionated, inspiring, and action-oriented

• Strategy - how you’re going to achieve your mission

• Vision - defining what the world will look like when you’ve achieved your mission

Problem

Identify pain within the context of your mission and strategy. Problems can surface qualitatively or quantitatively:

• Qualitative - look for places where your target customers are already “duct-taping” things together

• Quantitative - use metrics to understand how the product is performing and identify problems and opportunities

Great product managers have strong opinions and intuition built from raw feedback e.g., attending customer calls, studying metrics, and talking to users.

Pattern

Look for systemic issues that impact a large percentage of target customers -

• # of customers with the problem

• value of customers who have the problem

• whether they are uniquely significant (brand name)

Solving an isolated problem is sometimes the right call but should be the exception, not the norm.

Prose

Prose forces product teams to look beyond tuning a singular metric without considering the entire ecosystem or whether something is the right long-term investment as part of a broader mission and strategy. In practice, you often won’t be able to accurately predict the metric impact of shipping a brand new product or making a step-function change.

Talk about -

• What the product is

• Why it exists

• Features + benefits

• The value that the product delivers to customers/market

• What the problem is

• How it ties to the broader mission and strategy

• The potential impact it will have on the business

Priority

MICE (Metric, Impact, Confidence, Ease)

• Metric: What is the importance of the metric that this feature will move? E.g., do we care more about improving activation, or more about retention?

• Impact: What is the impact of solving this problem based on the pattern you’ve identified?

• Confidence: What is our confidence in this impact?

• Ease: How easy is this problem to solve? (An inverse of cost, higher is cheaper.)

• Multiply M*I*C*E, and sort from highest to lowest.

By the way, we just released our interview with Ada Yeo (CEO @ Shuffle, ex PM @ Coinbase and Earn) on PM News for free!

We talked about a lot, including:

• 📈 How she led a team of 12 at Coinbase to scale a product to $100M GMV in 12 months

• 🤝 How she closed $1.2M in sales in just 9 months at Earn

• 💰 Lessons she learned from raising $2M from VCs for Shuffle

• 🔥 And lots more!

Click on the image below to find the full interview!

End Note

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Have a great day,
Anthony

(P.S. Anything I can help you with? Just reply to this email, I’ll respond)