I attended a talk several years ago by the CEO of a very successful software company, and afterward a current customer asked about a product enhancement. Most CEO’s would respond with something like, “It’s on our roadmap” or “That’s good feedback, we’ll take it under consideration.” Not this CEO! His response, “Our product is not …
Product Management
What are you invested in?
I’m in the process of selling my car, and making a 20-year old truck my dad gave me my primary vehicle. The car was paid off, reliable, comfortable, and I really enjoyed driving it. So why get rid of it? Because I realized I didn’t want to invest my money in it any longer. I’m …
The Illusion of Progress
Clayton Christensen in Competing Against Luck calls out how many companies have activities that give the illusion of progress, without actually causing it. To use Yogi Berra’s word, “We’re lost, but we’re making good time!” This happens when we fail to understand the “why”. Why do our customers choose our products? Why do they choose …
Table stakes in product management?
I sometimes hear the phrase “table stakes” used to describe a feature. Basically a shorthand for a feature we can’t possibly leave out because the competitors have it, and the customer expects it. As a product manager, this assumption of “table stakes” is dangerous because it assumes knowledge of our customer’s needs and leads to …
Ignore your customers?
Shouldn’t we always listen to our customers if we want to create great products? Yes and no. Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake. Clayton Christensen – The Innovator’s Dilemma Clayton Christensen goes on to outline the dilemma we face as product managers. …
What is success?
As a product leader, we should never let our teams think success is just delivering a feature, because our product teams don’t exist to deliver features. We exist to deliver business value by solving customer problems. Any time we learn how to solve a valuable customer problem and we launch that, we have succeed.
Why is simplicity so hard?
Why do we produce such complicated products when most would with Ockham’s Razor that “entities should not be multiplied without necessity.” How do things end up so complex when we all want to have the simplest possible solution, design, or implementation that we can come up with? I believe there are a few reasons: We …
What is your product hypothesis?
What do you believe is true about your product that you’re actively trying to prove right now? Maybe it’s a new feature, a new subset of features, or even a whole new product, but you need to identify a hypothesis. The power in calling it a hypothesis, is that it declares to everyone around you …
Limited by your Leadership?
There’s an infamous bridge, known on the internet as the “11 foot 8” bridge or the “Canopener Bridge”. Here is a quick example of the bridge in question: I think our leadership abilities can similar to this bridge, in that they can limit us and our teams. And they can do so in a destructive …
What are your competitors doing?
What warning signs from your competitors might you be missing? Just before the start of World War II, pilots from Japan set numerous flight records outlined in a recent Air & Space article: “The flight of the Mitsubishi Ki-15 was the first of an impressive series of Japanese distance and endurance flights during the buildup …