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- Understand work - Dedicating time to deeply understand the problem, user needs, and context before jumping into execution is crucial for driving impactful growth.
- Impact is about creating clarity, delivering results, and proving you can do it again - It's not just about compensation or title.
- The manager is the most important environmental factor - A great manager can help address other issues like scope, resources, and culture.
- Build a stable of mentors to learn different skills and practices, not just a single mentor.
- Flywheels and growth loops - Identifying and optimizing the key drivers that compound growth is essential.
- Adjacent user theory - Understanding how user needs and behaviors evolve as you expand into new markets or segments.
- Partnerships and SEO - Leveraging external channels and integrations can be major growth drivers.
- Solving basic user problems like login/logout can have outsized impact.
- Deeply understanding cultural context is critical, especially when expanding globally.
- Investing time in "understand work" upfront leads to more efficient and impactful execution later.
Some takeaways:
- To advance your career, focus on creating impact: impact = skills x environment. (Impact is seeing problems and opportunities, and what is the right focus and priorization)
- Environment is everything that enables you to do great work that is outside of your direct control, including:
- manager,
- resources,
- team,
- scope,
- compensation, and
- culture.
- Skills are things that are within your direct control that enable your success:
- communication (the most impactful),
- ability to influence/leadership,
- strategic thinking, and
- execution.
If you're a student of product you can't just be a student of theory, you gotta be a student of practice as well
- Understanding “adjacent users” can be a key to unlocking new stages of growth. Adjacent users are the next segment of people who can benefit from your product and are showing interest but are not quite converting and retaining how you’d hope. You can identify these users by looking for cohorts showing signals that your product is almost a fit (e.g. signing up) but not quite working (e.g. churning at high rates). For example, at one point, Instacart’s core user base may have been office admins ordering food for their staff, but the adjacent user was a mom of four ordering groceries. The mom of four has very different needs, so it would be important for Instacart to build for those in order to grow into the new segment.
- Bangaly says to view product management as analogous to coaching a sports team. Just like in sports, not everyone needs to be a star player, but everyone plays a crucial role in achieving success. Similarly, the success of individual team members reflects back on the leader. Investing time and effort into coaching and developing team members not only benefits them but also enhances the leader’s effectiveness in their role.
- Before executing on a product idea, do “understand work” to truly understand pain points, alternatives, and, ultimately, the best opportunities. Too often, teams have an idea, find some data to justify it, and then start executing. And too often, this leads to failed experiments. Instead, invest time up front in understanding what is happening through things like data instrumentation, data analysis, or talking to users. This translates to “going slow to go fast” because the up-front investment will turn into much higher experiment win rates, especially as lessons compound over time.
- Use the “Managing Complex Change” framework to diagnose and solve barriers to change in a given team or area. The framework lays out five things a team needs in order to change:
- Vision
- Skills
- Incentives
- Resources
- Action plan
If you are missing any one of these, you get a different style of negative outcome, instead of the change you want. For example, having everything except vision causes confusion, and having everything except the right incentives causes resistance. Since these negative outcomes can be felt and observed in the team, you can work backward from them to their cause. Once you know the precise cause, you can solve it to unlock change.
❌ Identify, justify, execute
✅ Understand, identify, execute
Creating the clarity that people need to understand and believe in the investment
Impact = Environment x Skills (10:56)
Optimize for what your manager thinks is important/impactful