A Product Manager's Bread and Butter - The Problem Statement

I work for Amazon, but this article expresses my own opinions.

My dad got me interested in Dinosaurs, Cars, and Space from a young age. In our modest house in Hyderabad, at 7, I remember discussing implications of the ferociousness of raptors, the use of pure gold for heat dissipation in the McLaren F1, and the discovery of Hale-Bopp comet in ’95. And the thrill of watching Hale Bopp 2 years later as it streaked across the Solar System, making no effort to hide its surreal presence, captivating the imagination of almost everyone on earth! Dad also tutored me in Science and Math, sessions that he kept interesting with interspersed yet generous servings of non-academic topics.

Recently when working on a product proposal at Amazon, I got reminded of my father’s peculiar way of providing feedback on Math problems. Long before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos publicly announced their plans to colonize space, my Dad was using the Earth, the Moon and Mars to teach me an important lesson. Every time I got a math problem wrong, he would draw three circles on the top of my worksheet. Earth would naturally be the largest; the Moon, close by and the smallest of the three and Mars a ways out, coming in a respectable second in size. He would then draw two trajectories starting from the Earth to Mars and then to the Moon. The first ever time he did this, I had no idea what he was getting at. And then, he went, “If you approach Math this way, you’re going to want to go to Mars but will end up crashing on the Moon”.

Obviously, it was embarrassing to receive that feedback. I remember as if it was yesterday. I would expectedly look at my dad after solving a problem and he would calmly pull my worksheet towards him for grading. Then, I would be witness to a well-choreographed dance of a faint smirk coming together, and his hand drawing the three dreaded circles. Instead of a satisfying check mark across the width of the page, I would see the terrible trio of Earth, Moon and Mars come to life. He would purposely draw the first path from Earth to Mars, showing the planned destination and then draw the Earth-to-Moon path. His point of doing this was simple. “If you don’t take a bit of time and picture your destination and just jump into tactical or rote steps, you won’t completely fail however, you’ll miss the destination by a long shot.”

I didn’t realize it until yesterday (a solid 26 years since the first appearance of these three pesky figures; I’m a slow learner) that my dad was also teaching me an important lesson in Product Management. There are different names for this lesson. We call it ‘Think Big’ at Amazon, one of our guiding Leadership Principles. My dad called it ‘Picturing your destination’. In the product management circles, we call this, ‘defining the problem statement’. I wonder if we consciously give ourselves enough time to ‘picture the destination’ when approaching problems. I can’t help but appreciate Jeff Bezos’s mission for Amazon: To be earth’s most customer centric company. With such a simple yet unbelievably powerful mission statement, we can ‘picture our destination’ and journey towards it with eyes-wide-open.

At an individual product manager level too, we can take inspiration from these powerful lessons and spend time thinking about what problem are we really trying to solve with our products. The funny thing about this process is, when we get to the right problem statement, we will automatically know that’s the one. How? It will be the voice of our inner moral compass, tugging at Mars. We won’t be able to sleep, eat or do anything else but work towards that direction for our customers. A well-defined problem energizes everyone, whether that is one colleague or an entire planet. What else is Product Management?

Happy Problem Defining!

Thank you, Appa (Dad, in Tamil).