Reading notes on 俞军产品方法论. Page number in brackets

  • AB test lowered barrier to become PM, and weaker PM can use good result to slack off on thinking on customers (13)
  • Bar of PM (23)
    • to understand the domain model of a user - able to predict with reasonable accurancy on the effect of iteration
    • research user model, and analyze with real individual as sample
  • For user with consistent perference and congnition, no need for special scenarios. Otherwise, need extra work needed to guide user so that he would max expected utility by conducting the desired behavior
  • Hierarchy is more efficient than democratic process in the context of company. Note hierarchy here means the professionals and domain experts. Each hierchary inside company needs to have higher efficiency than market, and each expert needs to make better than average decision at his position.
  • Outcome of the product (useful to write after action report)
    1. financial gain
    2. domain know-how, more accurate self-evaluation and awareness, and innovation
    3. a team which works well with each other
    4. trust between user and upstream/downstream stakeholders. This reduces transaction cost of new transactions and products
  • Once owning something and then selling it means some form of loss. For the same amount of change, negative unitily loss is about 2.5 times of positive gain.
  • Problematic to analyze user as a natural person, i.e., # of registered user is a flawed metric - company may ignore what utilities it provides and how many user requirements are satified. Similarly, same DAU may mean much more user value, if the product satifies more user requirements as it goes
  • Tech metrics improvement may have low corelation with the utility the user feels. This means we should decompose products into utilities, analyze the iteration’s effect on the utilites, and then predict user behavior change caused by utilities changes
  • source of transaction cost (112)
    1. bounded rationality
    2. opportunism: mistrust between parties means increased monitoring cost
    3. uncertainty and complexity: have to price them in
    4. small number/volume market
    5. information asymmetric
    6. atmosphere
  • Transaction cost in the context of market (113)
    1. search and measure
    2. compare and decide
    3. execution and warranty
  • User’s trust may be far off from facts. In this case need extra work to fix that(115)
  • standarize product to make quality easy to manage, and thus to reduce transaction cost (115)
  • for bigger platforms, it is about trade off instead of innovation and design (132)
  • convert users new to the domain asap, this will increase the conversion cost for competitors (136)
  • Data-driven slows down the decision process, and only possible when data is cheap and readily available (142)
  • Extra profit comes from people with good judgement - often not data driven (146)
    • When have an idea, write it down and try to disprove it, and update it with new info and context in the future
  • User should mean a combination of requirements in a certain scenario (157)
  • If your manager or partner lacks critical thinking skills, agree and praise on minor points, make them feel that you are similar, only after than insist on major points (159)
  • Discover, but not create requirement(283)
  • Use (price user willing to pay) - (company cost) to decide if it is good business
  • PM needs to have judgement on the decision’s certainty and feasibility (288)
    • Care about user feedback but not suggestion
  • PM needs to decide when to data-driven and when to use data only as reference point (315)
  • PM should be gave to able to split the difference. (320)
    • Avoid right but aggressive person
  • PM should have good sense in decision making, commercial, and professional/domain. (326)
    • If only one product, then CEO or founder is the biggest PM