Why Product Managers must master Jeopardy!

[Jeopardy! is the game show where contestants respond in the form of questions.]

Building a product is a quest. It’s a journey of seemingly never ending questions. Launching a product is merely a milestone in that journey. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t. Product managers need to become comfortable asking the right questions before seeking answers.

Why are questions important?

We are wired to seek answers to questions – if you don’t believe this, you clearly haven’t spent much time with toddlers! Questions open your mind to possibilities, pushing your thinking beyond your own known or unknown biases. For instance, asking the question “Who else has this problem?” can open your thinking to explore other segments that you could target with your product. They also help in separating your point of view from the final answer, allowing others to participate in the problem solving. People around you are more likely to offer help if you go to them with a question rather than a fully formed point of view.

Building products through questions

Awesome product managers demonstrate humility and curiosity which lead them to problem solve through questions.

In the beginning, you question the very customer pain you are trying to solve, you wonder how big a problem it is for your potential customers, and you want to know whether a customer will have any willingness to pay for a solution that addresses this pain, and so on. In other words, you want to assess product / market fit through a series of questions.

Once you launch a v1 of product, you again have a plethora of questions to answer – how are your customers discovering your product, are your initial set of customers in line with your image of an ideal customer, how are they engaging with the product – what are they doing more of, where are they getting stuck, why are they converting to active customers or why are they leaving you.

Keep them questions coming

Often times, asking the right set of questions is as important as answering them. It might seem strange, but you actually want to seek help early on from your manager/mentor/investor to validate that you are after the right set of questions.

As you start answering your first of questions, you unravel many more which you want to add your backlog of questions i.e. a Learning plan, which is simply a table of your questions and answers or a plan to answer them.

Learning plan is a living document that guides you in your problem solving process, and brings your stakeholders along so they can help shape the plan or help answer some of your questions.

Time to play Jeopardy!

Although the makers of Jeopardy! dropped this initial title for the show, before you are tempted to start with answers, pause and ask “What’s the Question?”