How to build ground-breaking products: A manager’s guide | Figma Blog
Great products come from clarity: teams need to understand the customer problem, the reason it matters, and what can realistically be built. Managers help create that clarity by focusing on customer value rather than internal goals, involving customers directly, filtering ideas, and keeping teams aligned. The article argues that practical, collaborative decision-making produces stronger products than pursuing organizational priorities or exciting ideas in isolation. ## Design for Customers, Not OKRs - Avoid “shipping the org chart”—building products around company hierarchy instead of customer needs. - Localized goals and narrowly defined OKRs can cause teams to solve the wrong problems. - Roadmaps and planning should make the product’s value proposition visible to the wider organization. - Prototypes help teams: - Identify whether they are addressing the right problem. - Build leadership support. - Let decision-makers explore a solution before committing to it. - Make product decisions faster and more transparently. ## Put Customers to Work - Ironclad used a customer round table of 10–15 participants to understand how customer needs changed during the pandemic. - Insights from these conversations shaped a major portion of the company’s 18-month product roadmap. - Customers contributed throughout the process by reviewing concepts and beta-testing features. - Co-creation improves product quality while also making customers more invested in the final outcome. ## Filter Ideas Through Three Questions - Collaboration can generate too many ideas to pursue effectively; Work & Co. produced nearly 50 concepts for an IBM Research platform within weeks. - Managers should evaluate ideas by asking: - Why does this product or platform need to exist? - What does it need to do? - How will we build it? - The goal is not to choose the most exciting idea, but the most valuable and shippable one. - Strong product management connects creativity with feasibility. ## Keep Teams Focused - After selecting a direction, managers must help teams remain focused on executing it. - The article introduces the Eisenhower Matrix as a strategy for prioritizing work according to urgency and importance. - This kind of prioritization helps teams concentrate on meaningful product work rather than being distracted by less consequential tasks. Managers should ground product decisions in customer value, use prototypes and customer collaboration to reduce uncertainty, and apply practical prioritization to turn promising ideas into products that can actually ship.
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