How to develop a winning product? A guideline for the Chief Product Officer

The only way I know of to develop better product intuition for your own product is to:

• 1. Constantly use your product as a real customer would
• 2. Constantly research your target customer -- their habits, problems, environment, way of doing things, psychology.

12 ways to make the above practical in your week-to-week:

• 1. Use the product daily as a real user would [15 minutes / day]
• 2. Watch one or two user research or replay sessions [10 minutes / day]
• 3. Check your key usage metrics dashboard [5 minutes / day]
• 4. Interview a prospective client and ask them to describe a specific workflow related to your product [30 min / week]
• 5. Email or slack 1-3 existing clients with a specific feedback question [30 min / week]
• 6. Read notes from recent sales calls or user interviews [30 minutes / week]
• 7. Read customer feedback queue tickets [30 minutes / week]
• 8. Read the latest data analysis on user behavior on your product [30 minutes / week]
• 9. Read industry blogs / articles related to your product area, ideally about either customer learnings or from the perspective of customers [30 minutes / week]
• 10. Explore competitor products as a real user world [2 hours / month]
• 11. Try selling the product yourself, or tag along on a sales call [2 hours / month]
• 12. Read 3 books a year relevant to the psychology of your customers [5 hours / week]

If you did EVERYTHING on the list above, it would take you 10-15% of your working hours. Doing half of them would be more like 5% of your week.

• This is tiny investment for
  
• 1) honing your product intuition
  
• 2) making better prioritization decisions
  
• 3) gaining greater conviction in your work and frankly
  
• 4) having way more fun in your work.

Author Details
Name: John Masud Parvez, Top International Coach and Business Expert 
More Details: 

• In professional career: CIO / Digital Transformation Director
• In entrepreneurship life: Founder of VSHR Group
• In passion life: Keynote /Tedx speaker, Professional Coach