Unmanaged gaps can slow down progress, create frustration, demoralize teams, and erode trust inside and outside a company.
Bridging gaps is crucial for good product management, not just for product managers.
The article discusses key gaps such as customer needs vs. product functionality, sales promises vs. engineering reality, strategy vs. execution, build velocity vs. learning velocity, founder's intuition vs. customer truth, and internal opinions vs. market evidence.
It emphasizes the importance of great product management in addressing these gaps through empathy, validation, prioritization, and collaboration between product, engineering, and design.
The role of product leadership in connecting strategic vision with actionable roadmap items is highlighted for startups and scaleups.
The article stresses the need for product teams to balance build velocity with learning velocity to avoid building irrelevant features.
Product management is described as the translator between founder's intuition and customer feedback, ensuring alignment with customer needs.
The importance of relying on market evidence over internal opinions for product decisions is underlined.
Fractional product leadership is suggested as a solution to help identify and close critical gaps, align teams, and accelerate product development.
The article highlights the value of product management beyond feature shipping, focusing on building the right product for the right customers in the right way.
In conclusion, the article advises founders and CEOs to address gaps in their product development process to ensure long-term success.