Raghu Chetlapalli

It's essential to consider diverse perspectives from cross-functional partners such as strategic finance, business operations, and customers to form a well-rounded and objective view. Employing tactics like market research, primary and secondary data analysis, interviews, and feedback channels can aid in this process. Avoid retrofitting data to your initial hypothesis; instead, maintain objectivity in your assessment.

To achieve customer and business goals, it's essential to understand that a product is not just an end in itself but a means to these ends. Identifying strategic goals early on is crucial, as it allows you to defend your decisions, navigate challenges, and accelerate progress over time. If done well, you can make informed short-term tradeoffs that ultimately build larger value for customers in the long run.

Feedback loops are one of the most important tools for a PM. They help you validate the customer hypothesis and course correct the product journey. You can use feedback loops to understand "what customer say" vs "what they do", discover new customer paths & behaviors. Loop also scale very well i.e. as a PM you can engage with tens of customers but with product loops (say telemetry) you can learn about thousands of customers.

Feedback loops are a set of bi-directional signals between a customer and product. This can manifest itself as telemetry, customer feedback, forums etc. The important thing to note is the recursive nature of this exercise i.e. you hear feedback, internalize it, customer uses the new experience etc. As a PM, focus on the learning and the magnitude of the customer signal.

Once you spent enough time on the problem space, validated key assumptions and determined that it is a problem worth solving move to ideation phase. Start with assuming you have no constraints and brainstorm a list of solutions - try to be as creative as possible, reframe the problem as needed. You can follow tactics such as solving for various levers and prioritize based on impact, solving for the MVP of the problem etc. Ensure you prioritize the solutions list objectively based on impact, complexity, constraints and other vectors (cost, time). pro-tip : A lot of PM's get attached to the solution very early in the problem solving phase.

Once you have a good sense of the problem space, you need to dive deep into understanding adjacent factors i.e. is it an unmet customer need, what is the total addressable market, is there competition etc. This is also the time to revisit the assumptions and figure out ways to validate them quantitatively or qualitatively. Figure out ways to scale the research i.e. surveys, experiments, paid SME interviews etc to understand the space.