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“It’s a miracle that curiosity survives formal education” – Albert Einstein
This post was originally published on VC Cafe
When you are product manager, your work is never really done. The initial launch is just the opportunity to collect more data. You learn about how people use the product, analyse the data and come up with experiments to increase usage. Many of those fail and never make it to the product. Those that do, become new features.
In 2020 there is a treasure trove of training material, online courses and best practices on product management, some of it from the top PMs in the world. But when I first became a product manager at GLG in 2005, that wasn’t the case. One thing I believe remained a constant in the last 15 years is that to be a great product manager, you need to be very curious.
A product starts with an idea. Once formulated, the idea can become a vision. What informs your vision is your outlook, which is fuelled by your own life experiences and reference points. To be curious, is to expand that frame of reference significantly. It’s basically a commitment to continue learning and draw best practices from anywhere.
Like a chef admiring the spices in a street food market, the curious product manager goes about her day looking for UI/UX patterns, great onboarding experiences and features that make a product great. Inspiration can literally come from anywhere. One of my favourite things back in the day was to to sign up to every ‘beta’ on…
