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Product Management and the inspirations around it - a Malaysian point of view.

Monday, November 12, 2007

Making choices

Mark told me "Building great products is about making choices."
While he did not elaborate too much on what it means - here's my take:

A critical role product managers play is acting as a communication hub on product-related matters. That means the product manager will have to seek and understand stakeholders' / customers' needs and wants. While taking everybody's point into consideration, it is very easy to fall into the trap of "trying to be everything for everybody".
As a product manager, very often we have to make tough choices and be accountable for it. I can't think of any successful product that is "everything to everybody" - the only one that come very close is Google.
Microsoft isn't behaving like that anymore - they have, imho, recognized the space of opensource development.
Apple isn't like that - they know who their fans are.
Southwest, Air Asia - they made their choice first, then their customers chose them.

A leader is always the one who made choices and live up to it. It's OK to fail - but fail fast and move on :)

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