Top 7 Big Mistakes I Made In Product
Don't fall into these traps that can stifle you, your career, and your products
Hey there! I’m Robert. Welcome to a free edition of my newsletter. Every week, I share my story of building my dreams in public with bootstrapping a startup in AI, Alignment, and Longevity. These newsletters include my reflections on the journey, and topics such as growth, leadership, communication, product, and more. Subscribe today to become the person and leader that people love, respect, and follow.
When I first started in product management in 2017, I was a Senior Associate Product Manager building new features for a Finance product at Workday.
I had studied Chemical Engineering in college, and had just completed a couple years doing Integrations Consulting.
I didn’t have any sort of traditional background at all.
3 years later... I was leading Product Architecture across many product lines at the same company.
2 years later... I started my own startup in Crypto Gaming (with some small success before the big crash) and now contributing as Chief Product Architect at Dayforce and bootstrapping an AI startup, Epistemic Me.
I remember being a junior PM once upon a time: I was insanely hungry to grow in my career and learn everything I could to move up fast and have a bigger impact more quickly.
I had student loans to pay and ambitions to fulfill.
I had relentless parents I wanted to make proud.
I also remember making many mistakes that taught me valuable lessons.
I want to pass on those lessons to you.
🔤 This Week’s ABC
Advice: Top 7 mistakes to avoid in Product
Breakthrough: 1 Product book I recommend
Challenge: Go learn and grow
📖 Advice: Top 7 Mistakes To Avoid In Product
"It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes."
—Warren Buffett
1. Not spending enough time with customers
"The only way to do it right is to make something people actually want. You have to talk to them."
—Sam Altman
The voice of the customer is critical.
Failing to listen to their feedback can lead your product astray.
Always keep your users' needs and preferences at the forefront of your decision-making.
Talk to customers every week if not every single day.
Observe how they use your product.
You (and your Designer and Researcher partners in crime, if you are lucky) represent the voice of the customer to your development team.
If there is one thing that separates good Product Managers from great Product Managers, it is the ability to channel the voice of the customer so strongly that your development team starts asking questions about the user experience without your prompting.
If they haven't done this yet, then you need to focus more on spending more time with customers and deepening your team's empathy for your users.
2. Following your gut versus being data driven
"In God we trust. All others must bring data."
—Jeff Bezos
Data is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal.
Making decisions without considering relevant data, both qualitative (customer feedback) and quantitative (usage and adoption metrics) can result in misguided strategies and product failures.
Embrace data.
Learn data.
Love data.
Use data to inform and validate your choices.
You are ultimately the investor of the product—determining where resources go for the most return on your investment. If you're not using data, you're flying blind and gambling.
Even if it means learning to do SQL queries or learning a bit of python for data manipulation—do it.
Another thing—data also includes talking to customers (which is #1).
You want to be intentional in your learning—always ask yourself: “What do I need to learn here to move forward?”
So one key skill I would add in this area, is the ability to rapidly prototype—landing pages, mocks, designs, web apps.
When you can rapidly prototype, you can rapidly get more data (and learn) about your customers to best serve them.
These days with AI tools, there are no excuses against prototyping. You can get solid prototypes in less than an hour nowadays.
Your business case, your development team, and ultimately your customers will thank you in the long run when you take the time to be intentional about being data driven.
3. Not finding a role model or mentor ASAP
"Advice from someone who has successfully done what you’re trying to do is priceless."
—Naval Ravikant
The absolute best way to get better at any skill, is to find an expert practitioner, observe their craft, and integrate their methods into your own.
Find the best people in your organization.
Then learn from them:
How do they do their work?
How do they facilitate customer meetings?
How do they perform scrum ceremonies?
How do they prioritize?
How do they spend their days?
Where do they find new knowledge?
Find the best people you can who flex the skills you’re trying to build. Then try to find ways to work with them or gain their mentorship.
You will undoubtedly learn an insane amount, very quickly.
Networking in itself is a skill to build.
4. Building features instead of solving problems
"Solve a real problem for real people and build a product they can't live without."
—Melanie Perkins
More features do not necessarily mean a better product.
In fact, the more features there are, the more confusing it might be for a user to get navigate it to get value from the product. Always ask yourself why a user is asking for a particular feature—because they will ask for the world, and you'll be pulled in many directions as a result.
What is the root of their problem?
Are they trying to spend less time on the task? Why?
Are they trying to find insights that will guide their execution? Why?
How might you turn high friction parts of their user journey into opportunities to delight them?
Focus on the features that genuinely add value and meet user needs.
Quality over quantity should be your mantra.
As a bonus, your engineering partners will thank you for not introducing legacy code into the tech stack for unused features.
Solve real problems, get real adoption.
Shipping isn’t true success—when people use and love what you’ve built, that is true success.
5. Poor prioritization, including being in too many meetings
"The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say no to almost everything."
—Warren Buffett
You are the ultimate investor of your product—that's a big responsibility to wield.
It means you can have high impact or no impact.
Your ability to effectively prioritize will be your biggest asset in the long run.
One common mistake I made early on in my career was just saying yes to everything. An awesome product leader I was very lucky to learn from said this to me one day, and it changed my whole perspective on prioritization:
Saying yes to something means saying no to something else.
This applies to your roadmap, and it applies to your time. I won't expound on specific prioritization frameworks here—that will be a topic for another time.
For your roadmap prioritization, look up RICE, the MoSCoW method, and the Kano model to name a few to start honing your prioritization skills.
A common mistake I see even in experienced Product Managers is being too loose with their calendars and taking too many meetings that don't add value toward their mission: building the most loveable product they possibly can.
Most of your time should be spent with customers and the development team.
Being a Product Manager means playing defense on your only resource: time.
Your time, and your team's time.
The rigor you have for prioritization of your roadmap should be just as relentless as your prioritization of how your time is spent day to day.
If you don't take this seriously, you will be quickly overwhelmed with meetings on your calendar that do not move the needle for your product. And then you'll be constantly running late from meeting to meeting, and it will feel like there are fires everywhere.
Then next thing you know, you'll be prepping for backlog grooming or story time 10 minutes before it's supposed to happen.
Don't do that to yourself or your customers—learn to say no to useless meetings.
Whenever anyone requests a meeting of you, don't feel bad saying no (especially if there is no agenda!).
Ask yourself the following when you receive a meeting invite:
Will this meeting lead to knowledge, data, or collaboration to improve my product? If yes, move forward. If no, respectfully decline.
Can this meeting be an email or a Slack/Teams message? If yes, do that. Save yourself time. If no, proceed and outline a clear agenda with desired outcomes.
On the other side, you will probably be setting up a lot of meetings yourself. Ask yourself the same questions. Don't waste time. Invest time, to build great products.
6. Not going deep enough into the details
"Sweat the details. Misplaced effort at the micro-level can sabotage the macro-level."
—Marc Andreessen
I remember when I was early in my career, I didn't think it was a good use of time to get super into the details of where a button should be or how code would be written against my requirements.
I felt an aversion to going super deep on skills I thought other team members could provide.
I was totally wrong.
Don't be like junior PM Robert. Be better.
I've since learned that the best Product Managers get absolutely obsessive with the details, and have skills in Design, User Research, and Engineering.
You don't have to be the best at any of those skills, but if you can engage at a competent level in those other critical disciplines—you will make better products.
Period.
Why is that?
Again, it is you as the Product Manager who ultimately decides how your team's time is invested toward building the best products.
Product management is about making tradeoffs in the path of delivering experiences that your users will love.
If you make poor tradeoffs around Design, Research, and Engineering—you create product debt.
Product debt looks like a lot of things.
Debt can be poorly performing code that will need to be rewritten as you get bigger customers, it can be unpolished and unvetted ideas that you work on any way without proper due diligence, and it can be shortcuts in design because making the perfect widget will take too long.
No matter what, you will need to pay back your product debt—generally with more time spent later versus right now.
When you gain some competence in these other disciplines, you can better start thinking about the reversibility of your product investments and it will lead you to make better choices about your product in the long term.
Your tradeoffs will become more informed over time with this focus.
Get obsessed with your customers.
Get obsessed with the industry you are in,
Get obsessed with the problems you seek to solve, and the domain space.
If you are not an expert in the problems you are seeking to solve with building products, then your product will not be as effective or loveable as it could be.
Become an expert in anything and everything around your product if you want to be the best.
7. Not carving out dedicated learning time
"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled."
—Plutarch
The world is constantly evolving.
Change is the only real constant we can expect.
Staying stagnant in your knowledge and skills can quickly leave you behind. Commit to continuous learning and staying abreast of industry trends.
How might new technological or business trends affect your market, customers, or products?
What tools are coming out that help with your product work?
Take 5-10% of your time every week and dedicate it to learning about new trends in your problem space.
Whether that is reading thought leadership articles, watching videos and taking tutorials on new technologies, or reading books and spending time deeply thinking—intentionally carve out the time to improve yourself.
Ask yourself questions and go discover answers.
How might AI affect my product?
How might Blockchain adoption affect my product?
Should we self host this particular service or deploy to a public cloud?
How might inclusive design practices improve my adoption across different user types?
You'll find a world of difference in your creativity when it comes to solving problems for your users, when you continuously and intentionally introduce new concepts and ideas to your world.
When you level up yourself, your products level up naturally as a result.
This is especially true at the later career stages of product or in entrepreneurship, when your ability to get more leverage from more collaboration (people following your vision) is much more important than your individual ability to get a task done.
🚀 Breakthrough: The Lean Product Playbook
This is one of my favorite books on making great Products.
The Lean Product Playbook is one of the few books I’d recommend if you care about building products that serve real human needs.
Others have great philosophies, but this one has frameworks and tactical actionable advice.
It breaks down the real work:
getting clear on who you’re building for,
what problem you’re solving,
and why your solution actually matters.
It’s about learning faster.
Dan gives you a system for…
testing your assumptions,
finding product-market fit,
and designing quality MVPs.
I wish I read it when I first started!
Also go to meet Dan recently, and he’s a good normal guy with a lot of amazing product knowledge.
Highly recommend!
💥 Challenge: Be intentional
Pick a mistake from the list.
Be intentional about going the other way this week.
Keep learning, keep growing.
You got this!
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P.S. If you haven’t already checked out podcast, ABCs for Building The Future, where I reflect on my founder’s journey building a venture in the open. Check out my learnings on product, leadership, entrepreneurship, and more—in real time!
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