Product Management is Product Thinking
John Cutler wrote a great article here: We Need Fewer Product Managers. — To a Product Manager, it’s a provocative, and maybe disturbing title, but I definitely get where he’s coming from.
The best product managers start in UX
Some may find this controversial, disagree or just find it to be utter rubbish, but I believe, in the venn diagram of product management, it’s the background in user experience that truly makes the best product manager. I believe that in time, it will be UXers and UX designers or folks who came up through design that will eventually come to be the best product managers. You can have an understanding of the business. You can have an understanding of the IT. In both of those cases you’re removed from what the user are looking for and what they’re hoping to achieve with the product, and focused on the other facets of the respective discipline.
UX and the 80/20 Rule
As I’ve written about many times, I’m a great fan of the 80/20 rule in design and UX, also known as the Pareto Principle, and Jennifer Aldrich has written a great article at the InVision blog getting into a specific approach for applying the 80/20 rule within the context of UX.