Generative AI UX 🤖, Building product sense ⚡️, PM career path 🪜, Outcomes over output 💪, and more
Weekly Roundup 24 - December 01, 2024
👋 Hey, Sam here! Welcome back to the 🔁 Weekly Roundup edition 🔁 of The Product Trench. Each week, I curate deep dives, trends and resources related to product management and leadership.
Was this forwarded to you? Join The Product Trench 👇
Happy Sunday everyone! 😎
First, let me apologize again for skipping the last Weekly Roundup. I was fighting a bad cold (at least I think it was) and had to prioritize my health and family.
I also wanted to take a moment to express how thankful I am for each and every one of you. Your support, your feedback, and your engagement make this journey so meaningful.
With Thanksgiving, it was a calm-ish content week, but I still managed to find a few good nuggets for ya. So, let’s dig in.
This Week's Roundup 🔁
How to build your product sense: The trait that sets leaders apart.
Data-informed, not data-driven.
Outcomes over output.
5 steps to select your go-to-market motion.
The Product Manager career path is not a straight line.
Generative AI UX — Developing innovative use cases for the enterprise.
How to build your product sense: The trait that sets leaders apart (4 min read)
Product sense is the most critical skill for PMs, enabling them to reframe problems, spot opportunities, and lead strategically. Unlike technical skills, it requires active learning through exposure, feedback, and regular practice. Improve product sense by joining diverse product reviews, decoding leader feedback, reverse-engineering successful features, and practicing decision-making with varied audiences. Mentorship can accelerate growth, but daily application is essential to sustain progress.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Build a system for consistent practice. Engage with other PMs, seek diverse feedback, and reflect regularly to develop the leadership-defining skill of product sense.
Data-informed, not data-driven (6 min read)
Being data-driven can lead to biased decisions disguised as objectivity. Biases like selection, confirmation, and recency creep into data collection and interpretation, making data a rationalization tool rather than a guide. Instead, embrace a data-informed approach: use data to augment decisions, not dictate them. Key strategies to reduce bias include:
Cross-functional collaboration.
Focusing on falsification over validation.
Gathering multiple data points.
Reflecting on past decisions.
Becoming bias-aware.
AI tools can assist but aren’t substitutes for critical thinking or strategic judgment, especially given data variability like small sample sizes or regional disparities.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Balance data insights with human judgment by challenging ideas through falsification and layering qualitative insights. Use AI cautiously, recognizing its limitations in nuanced decision-making.
Outcomes over output (6 min read)
Prioritizing outcomes over outputs ensures teams focus on delivering customer value rather than completing tasks for activity’s sake. Many teams fall into output-driven thinking due to insecurity and a lack of experimentation, which leads to reliance on correlation over causation. High-velocity experimentation, paired with a North Star Metric (NSM), helps uncover what truly drives impact. Frameworks like ICE scoring (Impact, Confidence, Ease) enable teams to allocate resources effectively. Growth teams bridge silos across product, marketing, and operations, ensuring alignment around impactful goals.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Overcome output-driven traps by embedding experimentation into workflows, aligning your team on a clear NSM, and prioritizing initiatives with high ICE scores to drive meaningful results.
5 steps to select your go-to-market motion (7 min read)
GTM motions are established playbooks to efficiently deliver products to customers, such as inbound content, outbound outreach, paid media, community engagement, partnerships, account-based marketing, or product-led growth. Smaller companies should focus on 1-3 motions before scaling. Selection involves five steps: engaging customers, analyzing competitors, leveraging strengths, narrowing choices, and committing for 1-3 months. Tools like the traffic light system evaluate costs and time-to-value for motions. Persistence and iteration are key to building traction and trust with customers.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Identify 2-3 GTM motions based on customer behaviour and your strengths. Use a structured evaluation and commit to them for a quarter to refine and gain traction.
The Product Manager career path is not a straight line (5 min read)
The Product Manager career path is unique, flexible, and rarely linear. Entry routes range from traditional roles like engineering or marketing to modern PM certifications and internal transitions. Career growth offers managerial or specialized IC tracks, and success relies on skills like customer empathy, strategic thinking, and adaptability. Global remote work and emerging senior roles, including C-suite positions, reflect the industry’s evolution. PMs must embrace diverse opportunities, leveraging transferable skills and redefining their paths as they go.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Forge your own PM path by developing foundational skills and building on your existing experience. Embrace unconventional opportunities and aim for growth aligned with your strengths and ambitions.
Generative AI UX — Developing innovative use cases for the enterprise (11 min read)
Creating innovative enterprise Gen AI experiences requires balancing user needs, business goals, and the unique challenges of trust, control, and agency. Teams need to adapt their product development processes by using frameworks that emphasize authoritative data, cross-functional collaboration, and context-specific insights. This approach ensures Gen AI adds meaningful value while aligning with organizational goals and managing risks effectively.
⚡️Your Actionable Takeaway: Leverage frameworks that prioritize trustworthy data, collaborative input, and tailored insights to design Gen AI tools that address enterprise challenges and align with organizational objectives.
👋 That's it for this week's edition. Thank you for reading, and enjoy your week.
If you enjoyed reading today's newsletter, feel free to forward it to someone! Or you can always hit the like button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack.
The Product Trench is a free newsletter. I may consider some type of paid tier down the line. Until then, if you find my work valuable, you can buy me a coffee.
See you next time.
— Sam ✌️