What I've learned as a product person through 10 years of experience

After thinking about my work and product experience, I decided to share what I believe are the most important things a product person should follow.

📖 Bello's Product Guide:

🌐 Your Team(s) and other(s)

➡ Establish a good relationship with your team and other teams;

➡ Understand the strengths e weaknesses points of each person on your team;

➡ You are not the tech team leader; you are on their side to facilitate deliveries and guide them to reach the company goals;

➡ Let the team members choose the way (agile methodology) that is better for them;

➡ Study agile methodologies to know how to work with them (mainly Kanban & scrum);

➡ Present the goals and define together (with your team) what will be delivered;

➡ You don't have to be a technical professional, but you have to understand how tech things work (in a generic way).

💌 Product Tips

🔧 MVP

➡ Always begin with an MVP; this avoids the risk of a significant failure;

➡ Cut, cut, cut, be lean and focused in always splitting your initiatives into small deliveries.

💬 Customers

➡ Listen to your customers periodically;

➡ Understand your product as well as the user journey through it;

➡ Talk with people who work on support; they can share the main customers' pain with you.

➡ Product Discovery and UX research are essential; you will get qualitative feedback here.

🔆 Innovation

➡ Don't be afraid of trying something new; encourage Innovation; usually, the company's growth depends on that;

➡ Stay up-to-date with new technologies.

📘 Documentation

➡ Always make Documentation of the team initiatives.

📂 Initiatives, tasks, and plans

➡ Find the key persons that help;

➡ A Roadmap is an estimation; you need to try to minimize it and work only on a few initiatives that will help you and the company to reach the goals.

👀 Product Vision

➡ Define the product vision; if it already exists, try to unravel it.

✋ Behavior

➡ Stay humble, put your ego aside;

➡ Be always polite with everyone, but recognize the moments when you should push the team or others;

➡ Be accessible;

➡ Elevate people that elevate you;

➡ Being strategic is crucial in finding shortcuts that will help you and your team reach the goals;

➡ Face the Brutal Facts; in other words, see every challenge as an opportunity;

➡ Listen to others and other ideas. It's good to identify people that bring good ideas and work more and more with them;

➡ Avoid unnecessary meetings; many meetings could be aligned in an async way.

📊 Data

➡ Data is the quantitative power to understand where you and your users are, so track your primary goals and bring data to support you during all phases of your initiatives, plans, projects, and more.

🔊 Communication

➡ Speak in plain language;

➡ Always iterate with your stakeholders, and inform them of the status related to the team initiatives;

➡ Present data to support/communicate your positions and plans.