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 celebrating?
I was rereading Marty Cagan’s book Inspired and I came across this quote: “Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results. Bad teams celebrate when they finally released something.” Marty Cagan, Inspired It’s a good reminder that as a leader we need to pay attention to what we celebrate. Launching …
Principles vs Rules
Certifications are an information-dense method of getting up to speed on the work we do as product managers. But they also can mislead us into thinking that this set of rules or process we learn are a recipe for success. We can forget to think about them as principles to guide, and we fail to …
Are you leaving dirty dishes?
The Man Who Didn’t Wash His Dishes by Phyllis Krasilosky is an old children’s story about a man who decides one day, tired after a big meal, to put off doing the dishes. The next day, the same thing happened, and the next, and the next, until there are no dishes left! You can find …
What are you walling out?
I find myself quick to say no, to shut out an idea that I don’t like at first glance. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism because I feel too busy. Other times it’s because I prejudged without fully understanding. But Robert Frost in his poem, “Mending Wall” puts it this way: “Before I build a wall …
Distracted by shiny things?
Several years ago a leader in the radio industry reminded me of how easily we get distracted by shiny new things. He pointed out that having great radio shows and lucrative advertising deals was seen as so important for a radio station. The first drove listenership and the second drove profits. As a radio station …
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 …
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 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 …
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: What …