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12 product management challenges: the toughest parts of the job (and how to tackle them!)

Product managers are not the type to shy away from a challenge. Most product managers thrive with a fast-paced, varied product workflow. They live for the satisfaction of guiding a team through research, development, and execution to maximize customer delight.

But the varied, agile workflow that makes product management exciting is also what makes it uniquely challenging.

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A day in the life of a product manager involves switching between roles at dizzying speeds. Product managers need to be superhero communicators, strategists, innovators, organizers, researchers, and so much more. And they need to switch to the right role at the right time.

The first step towards tackling product management challenges is to understand them, and we're here to help. This article gives you  key insights on the 12 toughest aspects of product management —and tips to solve them. Today.

The 12 toughest product management challenges

Why product management challenges are opportunities, faqs on product management challenges.

In Q2 2021, we asked a diverse group of 100 product management teams a simple question: “What part of your job do you find most challenging?”

Their answers illuminated  12 key pain points for modern product teams.

Here they are, including insights to help you understand  your  experiences in the context of the wider product community. Learning from these issues will help you prevent or resolve similar problems, and get on with being a product management superhero.

1. Organizational comms

Why it’s a challenge.

Typical product teams are a beautiful cross-functional mix of product managers, engineers, UX designers, developers, and testers—all with different roles, perspectives, and priorities.

With such a diverse team, communication has to be seamless. Even excellent product roadmaps can fall apart due to misunderstandings and miscommunication. Strong relationships allow  PM teams  to work together towards shared product goals and adapt to changes rather than getting lost in conflicts.

That’s not all, though:  product managers also need stellar communication with stakeholders across the organization  to communicate key product information and get buy-in on new product ideas.

Clear, shared objectives that really speak to your team. Forget one-size-fits-all mission statements and focus on goals that  your particular product team can get behind. Adapt them when product or organizational situations change.

Two-way communication. Top-down communication controls your message, but there’s no real conversation. Involve every product team member by directly asking them for suggestions and feedback—and implementing their ideas where you can. You can do this on the fly and during key stress moments like major product decisions.

Sharing, but not overloading. Rather than sending mass content that makes employees switch off, be selective. Group communications and send only what’s relevant. Keep your comms with other departments short and sweet, too—set aside time for brief check-ins and save the lengthy mailings and meetings for when they’re really needed.

Speak the shared language of customer insights with other departments. Every department values customer satisfaction in one way or another. Showing other teams clear stats on how happy your users are and where you’re losing them will help them understand how product goals fit into  their  team's goals.  User research techniques  will benefit internal and cross-team comms.

Where great marketers nail messaging externally, great product managers nail messaging internally for an increasingly complex mix of stakeholders from other disciplines around the business.

Great product managers communicate with those stakeholders in a way that speaks specifically to them so they know where their needs stand, feel clear about what's coming next and why it was prioritized, and trust their product management partner's judgment in determining how to maximize customer value.

2. Deadlines

With so many moving parts, product roadmaps can get derailed if any person or department in a product team can’t meet their deadlines. There’s typically pressure from other departments or stakeholders to get things done on their timeline rather than your own.

It’s difficult to  design agile schedules that allow   your  team to adapt to new information or circumstances  and  other  teams to meet their goals.

Use fewer scheduling tools—but really use them. Be wary of creating an additional admin burden with too many different calendar tools your team won’t use. Choose just one or two and set the expectation that these are up-to-date at all times. Where possible, integrate with other product workflow tools.

Use team-driven deadlines. Setting delivery dates for key milestones should be a dialogue between business and product teams, and within the product team itself. Empower your team by creating an environment where they can set—and meet—targets.

Make roadmaps lean and agile. Plan for your team to execute in iterations. After each sprint, schedule plenty of time to review and adapt the plan.

Be proactive in communicating delays or other deadline changes. This is especially important for cross-team alignment. Give other departments a heads-up as soon as possible and tell them why it’s happening.

3. Team alignment

Different roles, viewpoints, and strengths can pull your team in different directions. Team members can get so focused on their particular goals that they don’t see the bigger picture, creating conflicts and delays.

Understand your team’s specific alignment challenges. Often, managers apply standard techniques to encourage team alignment. Instead, identify each team member's particular goals, needs, and challenges to learn how to bring them together. This could also include learning how to anticipate and address blocks in discussions around your shared mission and vision.

Give clear, shared objectives that make sense to your team. Make it easy for your team to visualize their progress through measurable goals. Link team goals with the overall product and organizational vision, so your team understands how their work contributes to the whole. Don’t overdo it with lots of messy, fragmented goals: define your North Stars and align your team around them.

Align and re-align. Change is healthy. It’s inevitable that at points, your team will find themselves out of alignment with the main product and company vision. Find out why. It could be down to individual or departmental issues, but it could also be a sign that you need to adjust your vision around product or market changes and re-align the team.

4. Balancing responsibilities

Product managers can find themselves pulled between different tasks and stakeholders with varied—and often competing—priorities. Most days, on top of your existing backlog, everyone’s asking you for different things, and everyone says their requests are urgent. Sound familiar?

Separate the urgent from the important. What’s important is what really, truly needs to happen to  make your product users happy . It’s easy to let your vision get clouded by other priorities that often seem louder and more urgent. For example, it may be urgent to meet an internal deadline to launch a new website, but what’s more important  is to make sure you get that website right before launch.

Rigorously question the value of each task. Whether looking at your product backlog or fielding stakeholder inputs, step back and ask yourself how each task will impact key goals like user satisfaction, new client acquisition, reach, revenue, and retention.

Use a classic value vs effort matrix to determine which tasks will give you the most return, and focus on the high-value tasks—which means both quick wins and longer-haul (but important) activities. To help determine these, you could run a  cost of delay analysis .

Let user data lead the way. Get clear data on what matters to your users. How? It’s simple:  ask them . Use Hotjar to collect information through  Surveys  and  Incoming Feedback widget  scores to find out where your real priorities should lie.  Heatmaps  and  Session Recordings  will also show you where you’re losing your users—which is where you need to focus.

5. Product team ops

In a product team,  people are everything.  Product managers play a key role in recruiting, training, and onboarding new team members, and empowering the existing product team to work at their best.

It’s easy for product managers to get lost in the day-to-day of product specs, fixes, and design and development, and forget to prioritize people ops. But attracting product talent and leading your existing team is the foundation of product success.

Hire with care.  Don’t make final hiring decisions based solely on remote tests or what happens in an interview. Work closely with HR or People Ops to make careful hiring decisions for your product team, and see how potential hires work within your team culture by including your current team in the interview or test process.

Think of employee experience as a product. All product managers know the best products attract and retain  users. Your approach to team ops should be similar. Hire the best product team possible and design an employee experience to make them feel valued, fulfilled, and empowered. This might involve taking action on employee suggestions, offering flexibility and perks, and celebrating their value.

Take a data-driven approach. You don't have to wait for structured check-ins to get feedback from your team. Send team surveys weekly or monthly and at key points in the product cycle, and ask them questions on the fly about their relationships with colleagues, workload, and feedback levels. Being proactive about getting feedback will help you prevent issues, offer support, and ensure your team is empowered to do the best job possible.

What is really important, and often not emphasized enough, is building a diverse team. We want to make sure our team represents our customers: people (men/women/non-binary) from different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives, all sharing the same values.

6. Creativity and being unique

With the pressures of deadlines and stakeholders and a growing to-do list, product managers are often so swamped with daily minutia they don’t have the headspace to  consider the big picture and lead a culture of creativity.

But to stay competitive and innovate at the highest capacity, creativity and uniqueness are core values for product teams.

Tap into the creativity of your team. Product managers often assume they need to drive creativity alone, but the best ideas come from collaboration. Create a culture where all team members feel empowered and inspired to share their ideas by creating channels to discuss new initiatives and celebrate idea-sharing.

Take the pressure off. Nothing blocks creativity like the pressure to come up with the next big product feature. Make space for casual brainstorming, where the product team can share ideas and observations without worrying whether they’re valuable or even realistic. Anonymous suggestion boxes and notice boards (in-person or virtual) can be great ways for employees to share their thoughts without fear of judgment.

Look at current problems and products. Remember that unique products are often developed incrementally. Creative product design isn’t about a random lightbulb moment. Often, it’s a less glamorous, more prosaic process. Look at your current products and your current users and think outside the box around how you can take small steps towards solving their problems. The big ideas will follow.

7. Keeping up with tech

Staying on the pulse of new technology trends is crucial for product managers who need to understand market change and user needs to inform product design. But many product managers feel it’s impossible to keep up, and worry about finding themselves out of the loop without much time to spare—and with no clear sense of where to look.

Build a tech-savvy culture. Your engineers are likely a great—and often untapped—source of tech news. Encourage your whole product team to share articles and insights* on new and emerging technology, and become more involved in content creation for your site.

Use different forms of media. Product managers are often low on time-and-attention resources. Using a mix of audio, video, and text sources can help you stay focused and connected to tech news in the small spaces within your day. By all means, use RSS feeds, product management blogs, and sites like  TechCrunch ,  ReadWrite , and  Mashable  for longer reads. But also follow product influencers on Twitter, listen to podcasts, and check out videos and Instagram or TikTok reels for bite-sized chunks of tech news.

Focus. It’s impossible to stay up to date with every aspect of tech . New ideas may come from outside your field, so you don’t want to close yourself off too much—but you should focus most of your time seeking tech news on the specific technologies related to your product or user base.

* Hotjar's Tech team just started doing this!  C heck out the new   Hotjar Tech blog .

8. Research

Validating whether the market truly needs the products you’re building is crucial. But when you already have a growing backlog, it’s hard to fit in strategic research or know where to start.

Set clear objectives. Without focused, targeted research objectives, research is an endless (and endlessly time-consuming) activity. Break it down into chunks instead of chasing huge swathes of information that may or may not be relevant. Define a specific research question, whether that’s “Does my product’s pricing fit the market, and if not, why not?” or “Has my user persona changed since the product launched?”

Balance different kinds of research. Block out time for distinct forms of research. Do exploratory analysis to better understand the problems you’re trying to solve and whether they’re the same problems that matter to your customer. Research the competition to understand the product landscape and hone your USP. Most importantly, dive deep into user insights to learn what users need, think, and feel. Which brings us to…

Ask questions on the fly. Many product managers put off research because they treat it as a separate activity from day-to-day operations. But customer research doesn’t always have to involve lengthy focus groups or weeks of survey design. Hotjar can help! Add the  Incoming Feedback widget  to key pages, use an  on-site Survey  as a suggestion box, and look at customer satisfaction ( CSAT ) surveys to get a steady stream of incoming customer data without the need for structured research.

9. Training others

A key part of product management is  setting your team up for success.  That may mean training new hires and creating a growth culture where your current product team is encouraged to learn, train, and upskill. Often, staff onboarding and training happen at the last minute without a clear plan, which is a missed opportunity for product managers to lead the product culture.

Balance information with hands-on learning. New hires used to be given stacks of company literature and paperwork to guide their learning for the first weeks. But this is both counterproductive—information overload doesn't lead to information retention—and uninspiring. Assign new employees small product tasks (quick wins are a great motivator) and encourage them to engage in as much collaborative work as possible.

Use your team’s expertise. Make sure new hires get to know as many product team members as soon as possible so they understand the big picture before jumping into their specific roles. When that time comes, incorporate as much peer learning as possible into the training process. Assign new employees an onboarding buddy or even have them shadow a fellow team member for a day.

Gather information and tailor your training. Be prepared to adapt your training plan to individual needs. Ask new hires and current employees alike how they learn best, what gets them excited, and how they like to receive feedback—and adapt where possible. Make time for both new employees and current team members to have one-on-ones with you to discuss their personal and professional objectives and how you can support them.

10. Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction should be your North Star. Everything revolves around whether your product satisfies user needs.  Without an accurate gauge of how your customers are feeling, your product decisions are just shots in the dark.

But many organizations struggle to collect reliable customer satisfaction data—or they gather customer information in stops and starts, collecting huge amounts of unstructured data that sits around until the next data sweep.

Integrate customer satisfaction feedback into your product and website. Use tools like Hotjar to remove friction and make it easy for your users to give you feedback on the go.  External surveys  are a great way of understanding customers’ overall feelings about their product experience, but only a small percentage of users might respond to them. Use  Incoming Feedback tools  to discover how satisfied users are  while they’re engaging  with your product to get a real sense of what they’re feeling.

Measure satisfaction with quantitative tools. Putting a number on customer satisfaction can be extremely useful. Quantitative tools like customer satisfaction score (CSAT) surveys ask users to rate their satisfaction on a fixed scale, usually with a binary yes/no response or a choice of smiley/sad faces. Quantitative customer satisfaction data is quick to collect and relatively objective, and it’s easy for product managers to spot trends and changes in this kind of data. 

Dig deeper with qualitative tools. To really understand  why  your customers are satisfied or not, you’ll need to use qualitative tools. Hotjar offers  freeform surveys  so you can easily access Voice of Customer (VoC) data. This helps you go beyond just measuring customer satisfaction to empathizing with their experience—and learning how to improve it for them.

💡 Pro tip:  to unearth the most actionable customer satisfaction insights, you also need to know what your customers  aren’t  saying about your product.

Use Hotjar Recordings to view user sessions from start to finish, then  filter Session Recordings  by sessions that include Feedback to pinpoint the moment a dissatisfied customer ran into an issue or hit a blocker. Placing their feedback in the context of a recorded session better enables you to understand where the problem is.

HOTJAR RECORDINGS ENABLE YOU TO VIEW USER SESSIONS FROM START TO FINISH

11. Data management and privacy

Don't be tempted to collect as much user data as possible without having a data strategy in place. Customer data is a superpower—and with great power comes great responsibility. In addition to having your own strategy, adhere to  website tracking  and data protection laws like the European Union’s GDPR, which highlight the need to treat user data with extreme care.

Be transparent about the data you collect.  Let users know what personal information you want to collect, and tell them exactly why you’re collecting it. For example, in the EU, you’ll need to specifically ask for their consent if you don’t have another lawful basis for gathering personal data.

Get selective. New data privacy laws are an opportunity to re-evaluate what user data you actually need. Beyond basic demographic data for user profiling and segmentation, you may find it’s more useful to ask users for information about their product experience rather than themselves. Strategically collecting the minimum amount of information possible will cover you legally, but lean data collection also makes it more likely you’ll use the details you collect.

Center data protection in your product and culture design.

Data security should be a core part of your user experience, whether by placing privacy notices in more prominent locations or tweaking consent forms for greater clarity. Make sure your internal processes are also driven by care for personal data. By respecting your users’ data, you can earn their trust.

As a Product Manager, the importance lies in communicating what data we need, how we use it, and how this benefits our customer needs.

Transparency in this context does not mean communicating endless pages of terms and conditions, transparency means sharing what a customer needs to know to help them understand the choices they can make.

💡 Hotjar takes privacy seriously. From day one, our products have been designed and built with privacy in mind.  Learn more about your privacy and Hotjar here.

12. Finance

Product managers need to know product revenue inside and out—but you also need to have a firm grasp on profitability and other financials to understand your product’s financial impact, and to inform pricing decisions and investments in new features. But many product managers don’t have finance training, and the business financial landscape can seem overwhelming and irrelevant.

Talk to stakeholders within your organization. Understand which financials are important to the stakeholders you collaborate with, whether contribution margins, profitability, or return on investment. This will help you focus your efforts on mastering the most relevant financials. You’ll be able to speak to other departments in their language to lobby for product investment or explain the need for further resources.

Upskill with product-focused finance training.  Look for finance courses or books specifically tailored towards product managers. Stronger financial literacy will help you create more nuanced product hypotheses, calculate market opportunities, and make more confident decisions—and will improve your communication to executives and stakeholders.

At some stage, most product managers will find themselves confronted by one of these twelve challenges—or, let’s be honest, by several all at once.

But product manager challenges are opportunities.

By tackling core issues with communication, alignment, and team ops, you’ll  empower your team to pull together  and respond to roadblocks with agility and grace.

Finding solutions to balancing your responsibilities and managing deadlines will force you to  get strategic and prioritize what’s important .

And troubleshooting problems with research, tech knowledge, and customer satisfaction insights will  bring you closer to your product and users than ever before .

Problem-solving is a product manager's superpower. Understanding the challenges we covered above, and tackling them head-on, is a path to more effective product management and satisfied users.

Let product experience insights lead the way

Use Hotjar to collect product feedback so you can prioritize and tackle the challenges that matter most, and create products your users love.

What’s the hardest part of product management?

Our research shows that the hardest parts of the job for many product managers are organizational comms, managing deadlines, team alignment, and balancing different responsibilities. Luckily, problem-solving is in product managers’ DNA, and understanding product management challenges is the first step to solving them.

How can product managers balance different responsibilities?

Product managers often find themselves pulled between different responsibilities and juggling requests from many different stakeholders. To balance diverse responsibilities, separate the urgent from the important, rigorously question the value of each task, run detailed cost of delay analysis, and let user data show you where to prioritize.

How can product managers align their product team?

Product teams include a diverse range of roles, priorities, and perspectives, so it’s easy for misalignment to happen. To align your team:

Understand the alignment challenges specific to your team rather than applying one-size-fits-all solutions.

Provide clear, shared, and measurable objectives linked with the overall vision.

Be prepared to align and re-align as you adjust your vision and alignment strategy.

Product Talk

Make better product decisions.

Product Managers, Level Up Your Problem-Solving Skills

January 6, 2016 by Teresa Torres

I’ve never met a product manager who doesn’t want to get better at what they do.

The challenge is not in the desire, but in putting that desire into action.

Product management isn’t a well-defined function. It’s changed rapidly over the past two decades.

Most of us have had to learn on the fly, doing the best we can. We’ve learned by doing.

There is no better way to learn. But we can accelerate our learning by looking to those who have come before us.

We see evidence of this in our existing methodologies. The Lean Startup was influenced by The Toyota Way and is grounded in the scientific method. Kanban , also inspired by Toyota, comes from just-in-time production practices.

Where else should we be looking for inspiration?

I have a found a wealth of value in research on design and problem solving.

Product Managers Are Problem Solvers

I’ve long held the belief that product managers are designers.

Design is a challenging concept because it has many meanings. The most prominent meaning today is that of aesthetic design – it conjures images of fancy furniture and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

But design is much more than that. And good designers have to consider far more than just the aesthetics of their design.

Design is a type of problem solving. It’s a method for creating a solution to a particular type of problem. – Tweet This

If this is true, we might ask ourselves, how do we get better at solving design problems?

Researchers have been asking this question for decades and we can learn a lot from their work.

David Jonassen, an educational psychologist at the University of Missouri, spent much of his career on this very challenge.

Let’s start with his definition of problems:

A problem is an unknown that results from any situation in which a person seeks to fulfill a need or accomplish a goal. However, problems are problems only when there is a “felt need” that motivates people to search for a solution in order to eliminate discrepancies.

The second part of his definition is particularly relevant for product managers. We already know that many products fail because they don’t address a “felt need.” (Ahem, bottled water for pets !)

Jonassen continues by defining a taxonomy of problem types. The distinction that we are going to focus on today is between well-structured and ill-structured problems .

The most commonly encountered problems, especially in schools and universities, are well-structured problems. … these well-structured application problems require the application of a finite number of concepts, rules, and principles being studied to a constrained problem situation. These problems have also been referred to as transformation problems which consist of a well-defined initial state, a known goal state, and a constrained set of logical operators.

Ill-structured problems, on the other hand:

Typically have several solutions, each of which offers advantages and disadvantages to different people and situations in the context of their application.

Product managers primarily work on ill-structured problems. – Tweet This

Our job is to generate solutions that have advantages for our customers and our business as compared to the competition.

Unfortunately, we are raised in schools that teach us how to find right answers to certain problems. But we graduate into a world of ill-structured problems that have no right or wrong answers and instead have several solutions with different advantages and disadvantages.

What makes this story even bleaker is that research shows that competence in solving well-structured problems doesn’t lead to competence in solving ill-structured problems.

How Not to Solve Product Problems

We often fall into the trap of treating ill-structured problems as if they were well-structured. – Tweet This

We look for rules and principles that we can apply or rote procedures that we can follow. Is this not what we are doing when we read blog post after blog post about how to prioritize features?

Many business school courses will tell you that you need to come up with ranking criteria and score each idea, only pursuing the ones that garner the highest scores.

We implement this recommendation by collecting all of our ideas into a spreadsheet and evaluating each based on its business impact, how often it’s been requested by customers, and its time to build.

We decide to build the highest scored features and we go on with our day feeling good about our decisions.

But all we did in this scenario is treat an ill-structured problem – how do we create value for our customers and our business – as if it were a well-structured problem – one where we can apply a formula or a fixed set of rules to find the right answer.

The challenging problems in business are not well-structured . And we shouldn’t treat them as if they are.

How to Be a Good Problem Solver

Fortunately, Jonassen didn’t limit his research to types of problems. He was interested in how to develop good problem solvers.

Here is what he has to say:

Conceptually, ill-structured problem solving may be thought of as a design process [emphasis is mine], not a systematic search for problem solutions.

This is a great distinction. If your job was simply to take an inventory of all possible solutions and choose the best one, little innovation would happen.

It’s not your job to choose the best option, it’s your job to create a compelling option. – Tweet This

As designers, when we frame a situation we create an initial design structure within which we begin to invent and implement solutions. … the problem solvers must frame the design problem, recognize the divergent perspectives, collect evidence to support or reject the alternative proposals and ultimately synthesize their own understanding of the situation rather than find a solution for a prescribed problem.

This is pure gold. To invent a compelling solution, we must first frame the challenge we face, explore divergent perspectives, collect evidence to help us evaluate different perspectives, and ultimately work to come to a refreshed understanding of the challenge.

We see evidence of this type of process in product management. We talk about defining the problem space before jumping into the solution space.

But how many of us actually do this beyond writing a jobs-to-be-done story or framing our user stories as opportunities instead of solutions?

How many of us take the time to explore multiple perspectives , use research to fully understand the merits of each of those perspectives, and then synthesize what we learn into a better understanding of the challenge?

We have long heard that a product manager’s job is to own the problem space – to thoroughly define the problem.

Jonassen helps us understand why this is critical:

Ill-structured problems are ill-structured because there may be multiple representations or understandings of the problem. So, identifying an appropriate problem space from among the competing options is perhaps the most important part of ill-structured problem solving.

Explore the Problem Space to Generate Better Solutions

We’ve all had the experience where we vehemently disagree with someone and we can’t find a resolution.

Oftentimes our disagreements arise from the fact that we aren’t aligned on one perspective of the problem.

I have my perspective and you have yours. And instead of working to understand each other’s perspectives, we instead argue over what seems obvious from our own perspectives.

In short, how we represent the problem impacts the solutions that we find.

More from Jonassen:

The process of problem representation is better conceived as the creation of a problem space. This process involves mapping the problem statement onto prior knowledge and constructing a personal interpretation of the problem (i.e., problem space).

If we don’t work from the same representation of the problem, we’ll never agree on a solution. – Tweet This

But it shouldn’t be a battle of wills – my perspective vs. yours.

Instead, Jonassen advises, we should explore multiple perspectives. Each perspective opens up more of the problem space, in turn opening up more solutions.

We should start by mapping out our own perspective – making sure we truly understand what we think and why we think it.

We should hear our teammates out as they map out their own perspectives.

We should do the same with our customers and users. Because if our perspective doesn’t align with theirs, we won’t develop a viable product.

Start With Your Own Experience

There are many ways to map out your own perspective.

In my Map the Challenge course , students explore opportunities for increasing the accessibility and ridership of public transportation.

They start by mapping one of their own recent public transportation experiences.

The key is to capture a specific experience – to avoid generalizations. You don’t want to map out how you use public transportation in general. You want to map out yesterday’s trip home from work or last weekend’s trip to a baseball game.

You can apply this same concept to your own work.

Map out a recent experience you had with the challenge that your product addresses. Capture your goals, your motivations, your thoughts, and your feelings throughout the experience.

This metadata around the experience is where insights are formed.

There are many ways to do this. And I’m reluctant to share an example, because the value in this exercise is to capture your own perspective – not map it on to mine.

So as you think about this step, don’t fret about getting it right or wrong. Remember, ill-structured problems have no right or wrong answers.

And right now, we aren’t focusing on solutions, we are just committing to paper our own perspective on the challenge, so that we can evaluate it and understand what we think.

Explore Your Teammates’ Perspectives

If you have everyone on your team do the previous exercise individually, you should now have one map per teammate.

Remember, each map should capture that teammate’s perspective. This shouldn’t be done as a group exercise. Otherwise, you’ll conform to the dominant perspective and lose a lot of the richness of the experience.

If you work on a product (say an enterprise product) where you don’t have personal experience with the challenge, have each team member map out what they think a customer’s experience with the challenge looks like.

Take turns having each person walk the group through their own maps.

Don’t compare and contrast or evaluate. Just focus on understanding their perspective.

Ask questions. Highlight differences. Be curious .

And don’t criticize . Again, there is no right or wrong way to do this.

Remember, the more perspectives you explore, the bigger your problem space becomes, opening up more potential solutions. – Tweet This

Think about this step as opening up possibilities, as laying the foundation for future innovation.

Immerse Yourself in the Customer Perspective

If we don’t take the time to understand our own perspectives (and those of our teammates), we will continue to be unaware of our own thoughts and beliefs.

We’ll argue over our differences with little likelihood of resolving them.

But it’s not enough to explore the perspectives inside the building. We have to get out and understand the customer’s perspective.

Some of you might argue that this is where we should start. After all, it’s our customers who dictate the success of our product.

But if you don’t take the time to fully understand your own perspective, you’ll project your own assumptions and beliefs onto the perspective of your customers.

It will bias your understanding of their experience.

You don’t want that.

Understand your own thoughts and beliefs so that they don’t bias your understanding of your customer’s perspective. – Tweet This

But once we’ve done that, we do want to get outside and start interacting with customers.

Customer research is both an art and a science. And to explain how to do it well is beyond the scope of this article.

The key in this step is to use observations, interviews, and co-creation exercises to understand the nature and the context of the challenge you are tackling from your customer’s perspective.

Develop a Shared Perspective

You’ve mapped out your own perspective. You’ve explored your teammates’ perspective, and you have a pile of raw data from your customer research.

At this point, you should feel like you are drowning in data. This is a good thing.

Now it’s time to start to synthesize and align around a unified perspective across your team.

I recommend that you start with affinity mapping . Use the source material from your interview, not opinion or conjecture.

Put your own perspectives aside as you explore the data from your customer research. – Tweet This

This is a messy process and takes time. The goal is not to complete the task, but to explore what’s there. It’s an active process that involves a lot of trial and error. Have fun with it.

Affinity mapping helps you explore your data and as a group exercise it can help you align around a new shared perspective.

Test that Perspective

There will always be more questions and more research to be done. But the team should converge toward a shared understanding of the challenge.

Be explicit about this shared understanding. Map it out.

Then shift from generative research to evaluative research to test whether your map reflects reality. – Tweet This

Use observations, hypothesis-driven interviews, and co-creation exercises to test your map.

Inevitably, this will lead to revisions to your shared understanding. Your map is (and always should be) a living and evolving document.

What we end up with is a research-backed shared understanding of the challenge we are tackling and a concise visual that represents that understanding.

There is no better place from which to start exploring potential solutions.

Want to Learn More?

We all know that we should explore the problem space – that we need to spend more time defining the problem than we probably do.

This process is a good guide for how to do just that.

If this article is enough for you to get started, great. I’d love to hear how it goes.

But I know for many of us, it’s hard to put what we read into practice. We need help applying it. We need practice space.

If you are interested in getting some real-world experience with this process in a low-risk environment where it’s safe to learn from your mistakes, I’ll be opening up a new cohort of my Map the Challenge course .

In that course, students follow the same outline of this post. We start with a little bit of theory on how to develop your problem-solving skills.

We then work through a case study problem where each student:

• Maps out their own experience with the challenge
• Explores the perspectives of other students in the class
• Immerses themselves in the customer’s perspective
• Synthesizes and aligns around a unified perspective
• Tests that new perspective with real customers

This course  will run from February 1st – March 13th.  Applications for this course are now closed. If you would like to be notified when a new cohort is offered, please join the Product Talk mailing list .

P.S. All the excerpts in this post came from the following article:

• Jonassen, D. H. (1997). Instructional design models for well-structured and III-structured problem-solving learning outcomes. Educational Technology Research and Development , 45 (1), 65-94.

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January 6, 2016 at 3:23 pm

To me, this quote captures the most-neglected ingredient of problem solving:

“[I]dentifying an appropriate problem space from among the competing options is perhaps the most important part of ill-structured problem solving.”

I don’t see designing solutions as the most constructive or important task, particularly for a product manager. The key role of a product manager is to clearly define the problem. And a problem understood is a problem half solved .

January 6, 2016 at 3:54 pm

Yup, I couldn’t agree more. It’s why in my course, we spend six weeks on it. 🙂

January 9, 2016 at 2:22 pm

Love it, going in the newsletter again! I’ve long advocated focusing on the problem but it’s hard for people not to get enamored with the solutions instead.

Einstein probably said it best: “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

January 9, 2016 at 4:55 pm

Martin, this is the course I was referring to when we were discussing workshops.

January 6, 2016 at 10:35 pm

I always look forward to reading your articles. Deep, well researched and most importantly, fresh thinking as opposed to the 1000th post about prioritization. This one is really good however, thank you

January 7, 2016 at 4:47 pm

Thanks, Daniel!

January 12, 2016 at 7:43 am

I think it would be beneficial to have an example of what you described in this post to see the benefits of using this method as well as the pitfalls that were avoided.

Moreover, I think that it would be great to offer some advice on what should be done in order to avoid product managers or owners from mixing their perspectives on a problem with the clients’ perspectives. All too many times I have seen product decisions made from what the product owner “thinks” the client wants.

And as a final recommendation, I would like to see some pointers on how to ask the right questions in order to get the most out of the affinity diagram.

I thought that this was a very thought provoking article and really enjoyed it. So please take the aforementioned comments as a compliment since I would like to see more. Nice job!

January 12, 2016 at 8:11 am

Hi Benjamin,

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. In my course, we cover all three things that you asked for. With this post, my goal was to just introduce the ideas. I’ll be expanding on it in future posts. So stay tuned.

August 24, 2016 at 8:52 am

I feel like we’re thinking about the exact same things except I’m coming at it from the designer side. I feel like I could have replaced every instance of Product Manager with Product Designer.

Part of the difference in my perspective may also be the particular environment I work in. We are an agile product development consultancy. We use Scrum (correctly IMO) and PMs aren’t really a role in a Scrum team, at least not here. However those responsibilities don’t just disappear. So balancing business goals with user goals and defining the correct problem given the solution space presented (a bunch of features/requirements), given the knowledge we have at the time, as well as pushing for a focus on outcomes over features are all things designers can be good at and work with the PO and SM to define.

The problem space vs. solution space logic is easily define in this famous quote:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ? Henry Ford

This is often used to prove that people don’t know what they want and magic visionaries are the answer. If you look at it through the problem vs. solution space framework you would realize the solution of a faster horse will quickly lead you to a well defined problem (Be able to travel faster, farther and longer). I talk about it more here and would love to hear your thoughts.

https://seekingwisdom.io/how-steve-jobs-helped-apple-get-back-to-basics-bcdfa90bb93a#.il0pt2ov3

The problem with PMs, in Scrum, is that it’s potentially counter to the distributed decision making that agile and lean methodologies work to foster. Especially if the the management part is primary to team success. I would imagine this really depends on how a PM is defined and acts in an organization but it’s the same reason why making PMs into SMs is generally tough to transition successfully. You basically tell that person that everything they’ve used to define themselves and their worth doesn’t have the same value as it did before and now you are a “servant leader”. This is much easier said then done and not solved by Scrum Master certification. Anyway I’m going on. I guess I have to turn this into another blog post.

Thanks for the inspiration once again!

August 24, 2016 at 8:54 am

“What makes this story even bleaker is that research shows that competence in solving well-structured problems doesn’t lead to competence in solving ill-structured problems.”

I’d love to be pointed to this research if you can!

August 27, 2017 at 3:06 am

Great article, Teresa. So many nuggets in there! For reference, the “well-structured and ill-structured problems” is also know as “tame problem and wicked problem” described here: https://christopheravery.com/blog/leadership-skills-know-the-difference-between-wicked-and-tame-problems/ What I have found most helpful is this thinking: “The advantage to tackling wicked problems is to know that there will likely be no complete solution. So don’t attempt to solve it. Instead, form a team to “design” the future.”. This is why Jobs-to-be-Done is so powerful IMO because it is a) descriptive, not prescriptive in finding solutions and b) helps you discover and define what ought to be, i.e. design a solution that will help your customers evolve and not just solve their current problem today.

January 31, 2020 at 1:20 am

Are you still conducting Map the Challenge course ?

I don’t see it in your website.

Thanks, Kiran.

February 12, 2020 at 6:30 am

This course is no longer available. You can find all of my current courses here: learn.producttalk.org

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How To Write a Product Problem Statement - Problem Statement Template

Key Components of a Product Problem Statement 

Using the problem statement to guide product development , problem statement template, idea details, why this problem statement template works, what happens next.

As the product world has evolved over the last few years,so has the way we define product requirements.

Heavily written product requirement documents have become a thing of the past, and a new way of outlining problem statements has emerged.

It shouldn’t require several pages to get to the point of what has to be done, and most importantly, why the decision was made in the first place.

The key to a good problem statement is to make it easy for everyone to understand.

.css-uphcpb{position:absolute;left:0;top:-87px;} The purpose of a product problem statement 

A product problem statement is crucial in bringing products to market that consumers not only need but love. This can be a complex process, especially when working on a new type of product or aiming for a new demographic. 

But a product problem statement may be pivotal in streamlining the process and guiding your team in the right direction from start to finish. 

The product problem statement aims to identify and clarify issues affecting your customers in simple terms. By the time you complete the statement, you should have a tight grasp on the customer experience you plan to deliver, whatever that may be.

Ensure you set up the problem and explain how the solution will impact buyers without jargon or unrealistic ideas. Focus on the practical ways that your product will impact customers. 

Your team and stakeholders should be able to understand the statement without in-depth knowledge of the production process. Otherwise, you risk wasting time on explanations — time that you could be devoting to development instead. 

A well-considered, well-written statement will empower your team to solve the targeted problem. And if you’re releasing a new product for a different audience, your statement will help you make sense of your new buyers. 

It can help you see a problem, and your solution, through your target customer’s eyes. That may prevent oversights and missteps that waste time down the line. 

With a product problem statement, your team may find staying on track and delivering a solution to customers easier. Create a statement with care, and you will be in a better position to make key decisions that determine the product’s direction and eventual success. It will help your team align and work towards their shared goal more efficiently.

Your product problem statement should include the following elements:

The problem statement itself

Establishing the problem is the most essential element of a product problem statement. Comprehensive research into your customers and the market’s top products will help you get this right.

But take the time to explain the problem without rushing to discuss how your product will solve it. 

The context of the problem

Consider the causes of the problem you want to solve. Are existing products too expensive for most customers in your target audience? Are they too limited? Has the problem gotten little attention?

When you understand the context of the problem, your team can assess the impact accurately.

The impact of the problem

Think about how the problem prevents potential buyers from achieving their goals as efficiently as they should. Think about how that affects their revenue, reputation, and market position . 

Thorough research could reveal that even a minor problem has stronger ramifications than expected. Solving it may improve the customer’s life in a noticeably positive way.

Example product problem statements

Here are two examples of solid statements:

“Users struggle to organize projects on the go with current project management apps. Existing apps lack collaboration features, are hard to use on small screens, and waste more time than they save.” 

“Auto shops have no simple way to find suppliers selling components for specific cars in their area. They spend too much time scouring search engines for the components they need, wasting time they could spend on generating revenue.” 

Product teams can use the problem statement to make smart decisions throughout the development process, from ideation to launch . 

A product problem statement can act as a statement of intent to refer to at each developmental stage and can help the team stay focused when new possibilities emerge. For example, if fresh ideas threaten to take a product too far from solving the problem, the statement will serve as a guiding light. 

Team members may feel better placed to make their own choices when they have a product problem statement to work from, too. 

An effective statement can also inspire teams to deliver a product that customers genuinely need. It’s not another generic release to add to the pile. It’s not a pale imitation of another, more effective product. Instead, your product is something with real value and purpose. 

Additionally, a well-written product problem statement empowers teams to prioritize features and functions. For example, a proposed addition may add aesthetic appeal to the product, but it offers no practical purpose. 

A guiding statement will make prioritizing those elements that help solve the customer’s problem easier. This helps reduce the risk that the finished product misses its target and leads to disappointment. 

And let’s not forget — a clear problem statement lets teams measure success. You can study the product’s performance and feedback to identify how effectively it solves the problem that inspired it. 

Get started with product management templates

Below is a template I like to use with my team that has proven to be of great success when outlining a problem statement.

Let’s break this down section by section to understand what this all means.

What problem are you trying to solve?

This focuses on the problem, not the solution. Instead of writing down “we need blue buttons,” focus on what the issue at hand actually is: improving accessibility in your product.

This changes the perspective of the issue at hand and gives you a more holistic view to start approaching the problem.

Most importantly, it doesn’t set a solution from the beginning. You know there is a problem (accessibility) but you aren’t defining how to solve it just yet.

What might be the result if your team tackles this?

How might you start running experiments?

Remember, at this point it is all just an assumption and that is ok — experimentation will help you figure this out further.

Taking the example of accessibility above: By focusing on accessibility, we make the product more user-friendly and increase its usability.

There might even be the possibility of revenue expansion by tackling verticals that were previously not considered.

What value would it provide to our customers?

Always focus on whether or not this brings value to the customer, as it’ll help you narrow down whether or not the problem is worth solving in the first place.

It’s good practice for any customer-centric business to always keep this in mind.

What value would this provide to the company?

You may not know this right at the start, but it is important to consider as you expand on the problem statement.

Main Action Points

Often smaller tasks will spin off from an idea.

This could include some initial discovery work, like creating surveys, talking to customers, or creating a spreadsheet database with some information.

This is your opportunity to log all the tasks involved to drive this idea forward. When you have a retrospective, it’ll give you a chance to understand all the work involved (and also potentially what worked, and what didn’t work!)

Linked Documentation

If there’s any external documentation — perhaps those surveys, spreadsheets and interview docs that may have been created as a result, this is your opportunity to link to them.

This problem outline is your source of truth, so be sure to link all relevant documents in this space.

How do we measure success?

Alongside the problem to solve and the hypothesis, this is probably one of the most important parts of this problem satement.

If you have no way of measuring success and/or no initial base line, it is going to be tricky to identify if your efforts resulted in anything worth your while.

You will also notice at the very top of the template there are some details, like status, owner, collaborators, impact and effort.

This template itself is part of a much larger product backlog with a dedicated workflow, so for organizational purposes it’s good to have these handy.

If you’re using a database, it’ll be easy to query certain data, like all ideas that have been reviewed and can be moved forward in the pipeline.

Having a simple template like this one gets your entire team — not just product — to think about outcomes and problems to solve.

It changes the conversation from “let’s work on this solution” to “do we understand what we are doing and why?” and establishes product-thinking throughout your entire organization.

This will enable your team to understand the problem and start running discovery and experimentation on it.

Once that is done, you’ll be in a position where you can decide whether this moves forward or not (and of course, why or why not.)If it does move forward, you give your team all the information they need to outline this further.

Be it with JTBD, user stories, specific technical requirements, or prototypes, your team knows what and why they are working on, what research was involved, and how the decision was made to proceed.

Is this just for product teams?

Of course not! I encourage any and all teams to use this framework to focus on outcomes. It doesn’t matter if you’re outside the product team and perhaps work in customer success or even marketing, this will definitely still help you pivot your way of thinking.

Hope you enjoyed this; thanks for reading! ✌️

Andrea Saez

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Solving Product Management Problems with 8×8’s PM

Author: Dan Zirkelbach

Updated: January 24, 2024 - 7 min read

This week our #AskMeAnything session welcomed Fred Radford, Product Manager at 8×8, to give you some insights on solving Product Management problems!!

Meet Fred Radford

Fred Radford is the Director / VP of Product Management at 8×8 where he is focused on software, Saas, Mobile, and API solutions. He is an experienced product leader who leads with a lean Product Management methodology encompassing comprehensive hypotheses, efficient validation, correctly scoped MVP, actual customer tests, synthesis of feedback, and observations resulting in iterations that converge upon product-market fit.

Fred has also been a Product Management Instructor at Product School for over 4 years! Some of his specialties include Product Management & Strategy, User Experience, New Product Development, P&L, Entrepreneurship, SaaS, Mobile, Games/Gamification, APIs/SDKs, Lean & Agile (Jira / Pivotal Tracker).

How to Solve Problems

Have you ever said ‘No’ to stakeholders or clients, and if so, how do you communicate this message? What are your reasons for saying ‘No’?

Yes, you have to say no… But you MUST empathize with all stakeholders.

One technique is to not say “no” but say “it is going to cost you.” Make the trade-off impossibly high and see where it goes. For example, “if you want this one feature for this one customer, all other customers will not get an update this year.”

When saying “no,” you might know intuitively that it is a “no,” but you still need to take the time to see it from their perspective and educate and empathize with their situation .

For example, if you have a sales engineer that keeps coming to you with one-off features, just don’t say “we’ll put it in the backlog” (another way to say “no”!), but help them work with the customer to dive into the real problem, if any and what value it will have. If that SE starts asking them-self, “does this move the needle?” then you’ll start getting better quality requests from them.

How do you handle vendor management when they miss deadlines and are not following the same agile timeline as you?

There are a couple of techniques that work well in many Product Management situations. First, take a step back and approach this problem as you would a customer problem. Who are the personas? What is the real problem? What value do you need to have?

It sounds like the problem you’re facing is a symptom of a communication problem, so let’s tackle it from that standpoint.

A tool/framework to use is to understand that ALL estimates are low. They forget about documentation, QA, testing, other work, and meetings, etc. Multiply every engineering estimate by 4 – yes 400% to get a realistic, quality answer. This shouldn’t be done at the high-level (project level) but on the per-story level.

What is the role of PM in managing or defining security features? Is there any resistance from the engineering team?

Don’t design features. Solve problems. What are the security problems that your personas have or could have and what value could you provide to them by solving them?

What is your advice on improving UX focus on products? A dedicated UX team with graphic designers or something else? 

Design is no longer “graphics design” but includes everything from information architecture to running focus groups.

I like to have designers that are capable of performing the old “business analyst” role so that I can focus on the epics and acceptance criteria and have the solutions be a joint effort with design leading them. This makes the product much more customer-focused than just trying to drive that focus down the throats of design and engineering from product.

As the Director of Product Management, what are the best approaches you deploy in creating a unified product culture among different component product teams?

Creating a culture is hard. Look at the movie The Internship . Many of the cultural activities are odd, and you wouldn’t see the leadership participating. My best advice is to lead by example and clearly communicate what your expectations are .

What resources do you recommend to help analyze and understand the business models of companies?

First, put yourself in their shoes (as a Product Manager) and ask yourself all the product questions about all their products. Then start doing some eternal research.

Find sites that have information, even if indirect, about the company where you can use their info to lead to more research. For example:

The SEC has lots of public company info.

For start-ups, CrunchBase

Look into their competitors with something like Owler .

Would you say elements of the Design Thinking process characterizes the bulk of what you do?

Product Managers have to do everything that isn’t getting done to provide value to customers.

That being said, if you are focusing just on design, then you might not be seeing the big picture. The best Product Managers are all about understanding the customer as their priority–which leads to an infinite number of other tasks.

Breaking Into Product Management

What do you look for in a Product Management resume or candidate?

Communication skills

Customer focus – ability to look for problemsç

Ability to answer any question – create custom frameworks

Time management skills

Results – know what is worth solving

Design critic capabilities

Engineering review capabilities

Business acumen outside of the product lifecycle

Willingness and ability to LEARN

What makes a portfolio or cover letter stand out to you?

Just like an MVP, there should be a focus on including just what is needed to prove the hypothesis and nothing more.

What were some of your biggest challenges when you first got into Product Management?

The biggest challenges I find in Product Management are focusing on the customer and problem instead of the product and negotiating compromises .

How do you make product trade-offs, and for someone trying to break into Product Management, what are the key concepts to understand to make better tradeoffs?

Whenever I hear “trade-off” or prioritization, I immediately think of creating a custom framework to evaluate the situation so it can be communicated effectively.

Take the problem on as a product and solve it the same way. The key concept is that tradeoffs are one of the “it depends” type answers for products and need to be evaluated as the company grows and changes.

What advice do you have for transferring from enterprise systems to SaaS, software, and API?

The best advice for moving between jobs is to try to change only ONE thing at a time . Change just your company, or just from Entertainment to Saas, etc.

The more changes you make, the more the hiring manager has to have “faith” in your ability to do it instead of proof, and you’ll be going up against those who HAVE done it.

What’s a career you’d love to be doing if you weren’t in product?

Starship Captain!

Let me know if you see any job postings 😉

I am a Senior Product Manager / Director with 18+ years of experience. Is there a Product School in NYC for online or in-person courses you would recommend?

Yes! Product School has an NYC location ,  and online is also available . First, ask yourself what your goal is. If you have 18 years of experience and are already an expert in design, engineering, and business, then what do you need next?

Do you have any advice for aspiring Product Managers?

Yes, NEVER stop learning!

Create a framework for everything.

Approach everything in life as a product.

Updated: January 24, 2024

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