Every Piece of Product Advice I Could Come Up With After 5 Years in the Trenches

Every piece of product advice I could come up with after 5 years in the trenches.

1. It will be lonely, so build a community, reach out to senior leaders, give back

2. Data is your best friend and your worst enemy. Do not think of it as your saviour, and don’t neglect it.

3. You’ll read books and get INSPIRED, but to stay INSPIRED you will need to be proactive, collaborative and patient. In that order.

4. You’ll think about taking up a different profession many times over.

My belief: given time and intent, you can do any job you like.

So why not do the one you already have?

5. Sometimes what feels like progress really isn’t. And what feels slow is good.

6. Don’t wait for your manager to give you budget to do anything. Ask.

7. Always over-communicate.

8. Even if your product is great, someone will still hate it.

9. You’re going to bet the whole house on a poorly validated idea and blow it.

10. You’re going to get lucky with a feature or idea that fits and works right out the gate.

11. You’ll spend the whole night awake thinking about whatever problem you have at that time. Sleep will be more important.

12. Your product heroes are regular people who got lucky and didn’t sleep on their opportunities. The opportunities they had probably didn’t seem like much at the time.

13. Don’t ask your colleagues about your solution. Ask your customers. Better yet, ask your customers about their problems in the context of their life, and forget the solution for a bit.

14. Learn how to write concisely. You’ll learn how to speak concisely.

15. Systems beat discipline. Discipline beats ideas.

16. You’ll blame your leaders for not having a strategy until you try to create one and realise how hard it is to do right, and then to execute on.

17. Execution will feel good, then bad, then good again. Find your balance over time.

18. Experiment often, but never with too many variables at once. 2 is probably too many.

19. You’ll start writing more and think you’re clever. Then you’ll realise you’re not. Then you’ll get better.

20. You’ll write a great document that no one will read. You’ll learn that distribution beats even execution.

21. No one owes you anything. No one is here to save you.

22. Be a paranoid optimist.

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Take every piece of advice in this thread with a grain of salt.

I’m just some random person sharing my perspective

That doesn’t mean it will be 100% true for you.