User:Deskana (WMF)/Product management notes

Core principles for product design
A product manager must keep several considerations in mind when guiding the development of a product.

Simplicity
In a world where thick manuals documenting a software product rarely exist anymore, providing a complex product and saying "Read the fucking manual!" to your customer is not sufficient. Simple products are intuitive and easy to understand, which therefore makes them easier to use. A product manager therefore strives to create the simplest possible product that satisfies the user's needs.

Consistency
Product managers often own a sub-product of a much larger product, with other sub-products being owned by fellow product managers. In order to make his sub-product as good as it can possibly be, the product managers must also make sure that each sub-product is consistent with the larger product. This creates a better overall user experience, resulting in a better product. High-throughput communication about product development with fellow product managers is therefore essential.

Balancing the core principles
The above concerns must be carefully balanced; for example, although a product manager strives to find simple solutions to problems, the simplest solution may not be the optimal one if the tradeoff for that simplicity results in a massive decrease in product consistency. In this way, balancing these concerns is akin to solving an optimisation problem; the product manager seeks to develop a product subject to constraints placed on him by the needs of the users.