Welcome to The Lens - Edition 2, a newsletter on Product Management and related topics.
Solving Ambiguous Problems
Some product professionals prefer "Problem Manager" to "Product Manager" — and while the latter is more complete, the former is a useful frame for how to spend attention.
A useful approach to ambiguous problems: use weighted, ranked comparisons with data visualization to structure decisions. When you can't resolve ambiguity through instinct or authority, build a framework that makes the trade-offs explicit and testable.
Two insights from a First Round article on startup ideas in regulated industries apply broadly:
Tedious work is a signal. "Always look for opportunities where it's easy to stop, where it gets tedious. That typically signals someone hasn't dug deeper before." Tedium often marks the edge of where competitors have given up. That's worth exploring. Context is leverage. "Sharing extensive context with trusted team members resembles downloading your brain into theirs — a superpower." The best-performing teams aren't the ones with the best process documents. They're the ones whose members understand why deeply enough to make good decisions independently.Metrics
Metrics fall into three categories: - Business Metrics — revenue, growth, retention - Performance Metrics — user experience and engineering health - Product Health Metrics — leading indicators of future outcomes
Important distinctions: leading metrics versus lagging outcomes, and vanity metrics versus actionable ones.
Vanity metrics look good but don't inform decisions — total downloads, page views without context, raw user counts. Actionable metrics reveal something you can act on: retention curves, activation rates, feature-specific engagement.
Josh Elman's "The Only Metric That Matters" framework is a good starting point for cutting through metric noise.
Manual of Me
Personal user manuals — documents explaining how you work, what you need, and how you communicate — benefit everyone: new employees orienting themselves, managers trying to lead effectively, and leaders building psychological safety.
Examples like Reid Hoffman's Blueprint demonstrate that this practice scales. The self-reflection required to write one is valuable independent of whether anyone reads it.