Hello and welcome to the bottomup skills podcast. I’m Mike Parsons, I'm the CEO of quality terms. And we today are going to talk about a product mindset. Now, this is all part of our special series on the best, the top skills in 2021 for product people. In the previous episode, we talked about growth marketing.

And in this episode, we're going deep into the world of a product mindset. Now I know, uh, you know, the call upon us in 2021 is to deal with so much change working virtually, uh, learning new skills, uh, dealing with uncertainty. It's like the whole playbook got. Tone up in 2020, and we're all [00:01:00] reinventing ourselves, learning new skills to be the very best version of ourselves in 2021.

So this product mindset is as essential for product people. And I want you to, whether you're a designer, developer, creator, or entrepreneur, I want you to know. That is really important to have this product mindset, to be really strong in the fundamentals of building product in the digital age, because.

Every business needs it. And so few businesses truly have the skills of product design and product development, product discovery, you name it. It is very, very rare. The call for product managers as, as high as it's ever been. So hopefully what I can do for you in this show is to showcase what I think. The product mindset really looks like in 2021.

And I hope this really helps you in your work to build great products and [00:02:00] to create value for your users. Now I want to get into kind of the six specific ingredients that I think make up a product mindset. And, um, they actually all each reflect a practice, a methodology, but I think these are also mantras that we can hold to be true as product people.

And the reason. But these mantras are so important. And the subsequent methodologies that they represent that they showcase is that we need to be champions, not only inside of our product teams, but in the outside broader. Business, even outside of the business, in our external business communities, because I think everybody is, is talking about building a digital app, a digital thing.

Um, and it's complex. It's hard. It's not an easy thing. So I really want you to be able to [00:03:00] provide them with a point of view. Simple powerful managers that really serve the mission of building great products that put the user at the front and center. All right. So I'm going to hit you with six. Um, I'm going to give you these mantras.

We're going to talk about them. And the great news is we already have courses in five of these and we plan to launch a another course very soon. So you'll be able to take really big, deep dives into each of these ideas. All right. So let's get into the world of product mindset. If someone says to you, what is this world of product all about?

What do you guys believe? What is your vision for the world? Well, I'm going to take a shot at it. Okay. So I think there are these six ideas and they are all core. To building a great product. If I remove one of [00:04:00] these from a product project, from an effort to build a product, if I remove any of these six ideas, we're going to have some trouble.

So I think these are the six essential ideas for a product mindset without a doubt. Number one. Is build measure, learn great product building is all about learning. So you will never have all the answers at the start. You will never have them all at the start, but what you will do is have the capacity to grow, to learn and understand throughout the journey it's intuitive.

Okay. So mantra number one, build measure. Learn the next one. Stimulate the senses when you're building very early, early versions of your product, do not build some sexy, shiny PowerPoint thing. And have the belief that you just validated your product. No. I want you to stimulate the senses, build something [00:05:00] that people can touch, pick up, use something that you can test task completion with, and you need to go out and build these prototypes.

These will help you so much, particularly in the early stages of product development. And of course, if you're going to be building prototypes, stimulating the senses, if you want to learn, you need to do that with your users. And this is the third idea I want to propose to you. That is a true product mindset, empathize with users.

If you have no empathy for your end user, your product will fail. But if you can be humble and curious, if you can listen and learn, understand. Walk in their shoes, you will go very, very far with your design. And obviously as we get around to building a product, um, the real engineering part. You need to build small [00:06:00] agile teams, you know, so true.

There's this very traditional idea about the mythical man month, where in it, people used to just throw people at projects, make the team bigger, bigger, and bigger. And what they found is that that actually gives diminishing returns. That gets to the point where it's, there's no incremental improvement by throwing.

More people at it because it gets too complex. It can't move fast to building small agile teams. That's mantra number four for us. So, so far we've got build measure, learn, stimulate the senses, empathize with your users and build small teams. Now, once you've got that product, you need to go out into the world.

You need growth, you need distribution, you need conversion. And this is all about the idea of test, the entire funnel. Don't just, you know, Tell everyone and announced to everyone, the products there and leave it at that [00:07:00] go through and acquire them, activate them, retain them, grow them, get some referrals.

Test the entire funnel. Very important. Fifth mantra. And lastly, and I sort of a different flavor here is build high performance teams. Now this one, the sixth one is super important because everything that we've just talked about, the last five ideas is all happening. In the context of culture and it's done by people and it requires trust.

So you could be the sharpest growth marketing funnel optimizer in the universe, but you need to know how to work with people, how to build a trust. Okay. So let's take a little bit of a step back and look at those six mantras and let's reveal, which practices, which methodologies they all represent. And remember what I'm presenting to you is [00:08:00] this is what a product mindset is all about.

Number one, it's the lean startup idea, build, measure, learn. So head over to bottom-up dot IO. If you want to know more about lean startup, super powerful, we have Eric Reese to thank for that is very valuable. So you don't make the mistake of guessing what your product should be. The second one is rapid prototyping.

It's a great practice. Some might say it's actually part of design thinking, but the reason that I pull it out is it yields so much value in the early stages that this idea of stimulating the senses early is really critical to your success. The earlier you prototype the earlier you learn. And obviously design thinking is a huge part of this as well, empathizing with users, knowing the paradigm by which we might create a user experience, build user interface, create interactions in the [00:09:00] end, helping users get their jobs done is a critical thing.

And that starts with empathy. And so tied up in this wonderful practice of design thinking. And obviously something born of the technology and agile and software world is agile software development. And the mantra that best describes that is building small autonomous teams that write code that works.

This is the focus. T...