The PM Mindset
Skills You Can Learn, Habits You Must Build
You can learn frameworks and tools in a few weeks. What separates strong PMs from average ones is a way of thinking. Three habits matter most: customer obsession, balancing data and intuition, and ruthless prioritisation.
1. Customer Obsession
Customer obsession means you keep coming back to one question: "What problem is the user actually trying to solve?"
It is easy to fall in love with your own solution. A team might spend months building a beautiful in-app budgeting tool, only to discover that their users, small traders who move money mostly by USSD on basic phones, never open the app at all.
Problems, not features
Users rarely give you a perfect feature request, but they always give you clues about a problem.
| What the user says | The problem underneath |
|---|---|
| "Please add a dark mode." | "The app hurts my eyes at night" or "It drains my battery." |
| "Can you make transfers faster?" | "I don't know if my money went through, and I'm anxious." |
| "Add more payment options." | "My preferred method is not supported, so I abandon checkout." |
Listen for the why. A useful technique is the Five Whys: keep asking "why?" until you reach the root cause.
Get close to real users
- Speak to users every week, not once a quarter.
- Sit with customer support and read the tickets and call logs.
- Watch real people use the product. In many markets (Nigeria, Kenya, India) that may mean testing on a low-end Android phone with an unstable network, because that is how many of your users will experience it.
- Remember that you are not your user. Your phone, your data plan and your habits are probably not typical.
2. Data vs Intuition
New PMs often think they must choose between "being data-driven" and "trusting their gut". Good PMs use both, at different times.
What data is good at
- Telling you what is happening: sign-ups dropped 20% after the last release.
- Sizing problems: how many users are affected?
- Measuring whether a change worked.
What data cannot do
- Tell you why people behave that way.
- Show you what users would do with something that does not exist yet.
- Replace a conversation with a customer.
What intuition is good at
Intuition, built from experience and many customer conversations, helps you form hypotheses quickly and decide when the data is incomplete. It is dangerous when it is the only input, because it is biased by your own experience.
A simple rule
Use qualitative research (interviews, observation) to find out why, and quantitative data (analytics) to find out how much. Then combine them into a decision, and be ready to change your mind when new evidence appears.
Consider an e-commerce PM (in Lagos, London, or anywhere else) who sees that 60% of users abandon checkout at the payment step. The data says where. Interviews reveal that many customers are not confident that card payments will succeed and would rather pay on delivery. Together, these lead to a much better decision than either alone.
3. Prioritisation
You will always have more ideas than time. Prioritising means choosing what to do, in what order, and what to leave out.
Why it is hard
Every request comes from someone who cares about it: the CEO, sales, support, engineers. Saying "not now" without damaging relationships is a skill.
A simple framework: RICE
RICE scores an idea on four factors:
- Reach – how many users will this affect in a given period?
- Impact – how much will it move the needle for each of them? (For example: 3 = massive, 2 = high, 1 = medium, 0.5 = low.)
- Confidence – how sure are you about your estimates? (100%, 80%, 50%)
- Effort – how many person-months will it take?
RICE score = (Reach x Impact x Confidence) / Effort
Example for a telecoms self-service app:
| Idea | Reach | Impact | Confidence | Effort | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Airtime top-up reminders | 40,000 | 1 | 80% | 1 | 32,000 |
| Full app redesign | 100,000 | 1 | 50% | 6 | 8,333 |
| Fix failed data-bundle purchases | 25,000 | 3 | 100% | 2 | 37,500 |
The redesign feels exciting, but fixing failed purchases scores highest because it affects many users painfully and is cheap to do. Scores are a conversation starter, not an answer. They force you to state your assumptions so others can challenge them.
Other useful tools
- MoSCoW: Must have, Should have, Could have, Won't have (this time).
- Impact vs Effort matrix: do high-impact, low-effort items first.
Saying no
A good "no" is respectful, explains the reasoning, and points to what would change the answer. For example: "We are focusing on reliability this quarter because failed transfers are our biggest source of churn. I have added your idea to the list, and we will look at it again in planning."
Putting It Together
A PM with the right mindset asks:
- What problem is the user really facing? (customer obsession)
- What does the data say, and what does it not tell me? (data and intuition)
- Given limited time, is this the most valuable thing to do right now? (prioritisation)
Practise these three questions on every idea you meet, and you will already think like a PM.
Try it yourself
Key Takeaways
- Customer obsession means focusing on the underlying problem, not just the feature a user asks for.
- You are not your user: test on the devices, networks and habits your real customers have.
- Use qualitative research to learn why and quantitative data to learn how much.
- Frameworks like RICE make assumptions visible and start better conversations, but they do not replace judgement.
- A respectful, well-explained 'no' protects the team's focus and builds trust with stakeholders.
Quick Quiz
1.A user says: "Can you make transfers faster?" Following customer obsession, what should the PM do first?
2.Which statement about data and intuition is most accurate?
3.An idea has Reach 20,000, Impact 2, Confidence 50% and Effort 4 person-months. What is its RICE score?
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