Jiaona Zhang: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. So my question, the real question I want to ask about this is, in that time you've seen a lot of new PMs and you've seen these PMs succeed, you've seen some fail. What are the most common mistakes that you find new PMs make in this experience of helping new PMs get into the field? I think something that is really hard to untrain, but I think every human does it, is you jump to solutions. And so one of the biggest things I see, not just in my course but also just as a PM and some of the mistakes that you make as a PM is the idea of you get really attached to a solution, a way of implementing something that you can see in your head that you want to build. And so that's the first thing I really want to unteach in our course. And so a lot of people will literally come in, they'll be like, "I want to build X startup" or "I want to do this thing," or "I'm in blank school and I've been doing a lot of research on this particular area." And so untraining that and being like, "Hey, we're going to go out there. We are not going to think at all about the thing that you want to build, but instead we're going to be focused on users and people in the real world and their problems. And the first step is to understand their problems and then understand if there's an opportunity here as opposed to, 'Hey, you want to build X thing for Y person.'" So that's the biggest mistake that you really have to unteach and retrain thinking around. Does a lot of this come from people want to get into product management because they think "Finally I'll have the power, finally I'll be able to tell people what to build, finally my ideas really going to matter?" Is that where a lot lobby comes from?…

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