SUNDAY REWIND: The biggest challenge for product managers?

What is your biggest challenge as a product manager? The million-dollar question had Christian Bonilla thinking. He, therefore, decided to publish his key findings and his thoughts on this matter, which is what we’ll be delving into for this Sunday Rewind episode.

The big takeaway: we don’t know whether we’re building the right products…

Aside from a few facts about their company and role, Christian asked respondents to answer a single, open-ended question: What’s your #1 single biggest product management challenge right now? He found that the primary challenge on most product managers’ minds is: setting roadmap priorities without real market feedback.

The research commenced by Christian found that across all respondents, 49% of product managers said that their foremost challenge is being able to conduct proper market research to validate whether the market truly needs what they’re building. When he looked at only the responses from enterprise software product managers, this figure jumps up to 62%.

Have a look at other episodes in our Sunday Rewind series.

Turning this challenge into an opportunity to rethink your product vision

A great product vision comes from knowing your customers so intimately that you can design a product that perfectly meets their needs, Christian says. Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges of managing products at software companies is that the pressure to move fast leads people to substitute their own experiences for market validation. Product failures are often traced back to a misunderstanding or outright ignorance of what users (and buyers) really care about.

Christian closes by saying, “the most successful product managers tend to be the ones who understand their market best. Invest your time accordingly.”

Delve deeper into the biggest challenge for product managers, and read insights into how Christian feels is the best way to hurdle this obstacle.

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