Back in 2018, after reading “Inspired: How to create tech products customers love” by Marty Cagan, I was totally inspired by the idea that a product manager is like a CEO of a product. Isn’t it cool to be a “product boss” who leads a team (but is actually nobody’s boss ) delivering value to the society, while taking home a monthly pay check?
I was a newbie product manager, eager to learn the rope. But very soon, I realised that before getting to the sexy stuff like thought leadership or product vision, the road to Rome wasn’t all that sexy.
I was tasked with evaluating if my company could have a profitable product that prevents falls among the elderly, i.e. market research 101.
In market research, the devils are in the details
For a while, I spent all of my waking hours doing 3 things: research, bouncing off ideas with people, and more research.
First of all, what exactly is the problem that we are trying to solve? How bad is it?
This isn’t a new problem; so someone must have taken a crack at it. Why have they not been successful?
How do I get access to caregivers, healthcare providers, and the elderly to hear their views?
I was a first-time surfer being swept under the waves of technical complexity
While the problem statement was being refined, technical discussions already started. My engineering team proposed video analytics as an option, which I knew nuts about.
Again, I spent many hours each day learning from the team the basics of video analytics, video streaming, storage, network, servers, chipsets, circuit board, etc. (I was quite lucky to have helpful colleagues who did not mind my one million and one questions.)
No amount of desk research will beat getting close to real users
It was easy to get lost in the complexity of defining a new product, not to mention a medical hardware product to top the madness (story for another day). But looking back, the hardest part was to actually care about this problem I was supposed to solve.
It was something that was handed to me. I had no professional experience in the healthcare sector. Did not know how caring for an elderly family member was like. And was certainly not in the shoe of an elderly.
I worked like a machine, churning out business cases describing pain points of the elderly and their caregivers, and assigning dollar values to the cost of falls (because I needed a quantifiable market size).
Only when I started working with a hospital and having conversations with real users, could I put a face, a voice, a story to my Excel file and PowerPoint slides.
More often than not, a junior product manager with little relevant industry experience will go through a phase where problem statements are handed to them. There might be lots of uncertainty and self-doubt. Our best bet is to accept the uncertainty, acknowledge that we barely know anything, and absorb everything like a sponge. And soon enough, we will be able to form our own opinions.
With that being said, it does not mean junior product managers won’t get to experience the “sexy” moments. Stay tuned for “a sexy day in the life of a new product manager”.
