107 / A Lesson in Product Management: Outcomes > Outputs, with Kax Uson

Product Momentum Podcast

The journey of Kax Uson from employee #1 at an e-commerce start-up in the Philippines to Head of Product at Adevinta looks familiar to the path so many product managers have taken. At every turn, she’s learned the processes and tools that come with the role – and then unlearned the ones that became a burden to her effectiveness in it.

In this episode of Product Momentum, Kax guides us along her journey and offers a primer on what it means to be a successful product manager in the 21^st century.

“When users look at the products we build,” she says, “they don’t care whether it was built using Kanban or Scrum or Waterfall. Our users see only the product and feel the experience we’ve delivered for them. The process that we use to get there is not relevant.”

There’s a lot of focus in the product space on ‘getting these things right versus actually getting things done.’ The outputs over the outcomes, Kax adds.

“Things to do. Rules to follow as product managers. When really, that’s just a very small part of how to build products. I feel that we’re favoring more these tools and these frameworks, rather than learning how to work with people in order to build good products.

“Our contribution [as PMs] to product building is very intangible. Our role is to bring people together, to rise through the uncertainty and make sense of things, so that other people can actually understand what’s going on and bring trust inside the room. That’s a skill that you cannot learn from school, or any camp probably…it’s a skill that you learn by practice and by getting feedback and failing in some cases.

Be sure to catch the entire pod conversation with Kax Uson; so many more nuggets to share.

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Is this a reunion of Product Momentum alumni? Not quite. It’s ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023. June 22-23 in Rochester, NY. Featuring Radhika Dutt, Jesse James Garrett, Rich Mironov – additional speakers coming soon! Learn more.

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