Peter Yang: 10 Rules for Making Products that Customers Love | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Peter Yang argues that great product management is a craft, not an instinct or checklist. Product managers must continually develop product sense, deeply understand customers, think strategically before executing, and protect quality through difficult trade-offs. The goal is to build products customers genuinely value, even when that requires delaying milestones or abandoning a beloved project.

Product Sense Must Be Cultivated

• Product sense is the ability to create products or changes that have the intended impact on users.
• It is not a permanent, intuitive skill; markets and customer needs constantly change.
• PMs should continually improve through:
  • Empathy
  • Creativity
  • Attention to craft
  • Humility and ongoing learning

Use Empathy to Diagnose the Problem

• Teams often rush into solutions before clearly understanding the customer or business problem.
• Peter cites empathy as a product manager’s superpower.
• PMs can build empathy by:
  • Treating customers like members of the team
  • Speaking directly with them
  • Personally using the product as customers do, even for just an hour
• Accurate problem diagnosis should come before defining a vision or solution.

Start with Big Ideas Before Daily Execution

• Once the problems are understood, teams should pause before getting absorbed in execution.
• Collaboratively define:
  • Mission
  • Vision
  • Strategy
• Brainstorm ambitious, “blue-sky” ideas and prioritize them.
• Seek simple solutions—potentially a few clear steps—that best address customer needs.
• New learning may require changing priorities and making trade-offs.

Protect Quality and Know When to Change Course

• Quality may require missing a launch date or short-term OKR.
• In one example, Yang chose to add an important feature identified through customer conversations, even though it meant missing a quarterly deadline.
• Craft means obsessing over details, trade-offs, bugs, and the extra work required to create a worthwhile experience.
• Product managers must also recognize when a project should be canceled.
• At Reddit, Yang worked on Reddit Talk, a well-loved live audio product, but the project was ended during an economic downturn because it did not improve the company’s most important metrics.
• Good product judgment includes considering the company’s broader needs rather than becoming attached to a particular product.

The practical recommendation is to keep customer understanding and product quality at the center of decision-making, while remaining flexible enough to delay, redirect, or stop work when the evidence demands it.