Thoughts on Product Management

 

Product Management, surprisingly, is not a course offered in any of the schools, Business or engineering, and its one of the most important roles in the building great products. Over the past two days I was lucky to attend a two day course on product management by Marty Cagan of the Silicon Valley Product Group (www.svpg.com). I would highly recommend this course to anyone interested in the “art” of Product Management.

 I am capturing some thoughts from the course. Disclaimer: These are fleeting “takeaways” and its only fair not to talk about the details of the course here – you still need to attend the workshop to get the full value of the course. 

“Very rarely are companies late” – there is always a debate on if a market/service is well served – is there a space for yet another product here? E.g.: Google entered a market where there were quite a few search products through altavisa, lycos, etc. Ofcourse, the exceptions to this rule is product spaces that involve huge network effects like social networking and other community products – classified, etc where a better product entering late may find itself difficult to break in.

 

“Don’t delegate to customers to tell you what they need”

“Customers don’t know what’s possible”

– In essence don’t base your product requirements purely on customer’s *called out* needs.

 

“Users give you credit for what they can use” – you may develop a product with lots of different features – but if they cannot be discovered by the user easily they are hardly of any use. Discoverability and desirability are the key.

 

“Improve a product enough and you may eventually ruin it” – guess sometimes PM’s end up adding newer features almost to justify their presence – you may end up increasing the complexity of the product.

 

 

 

“Ugliness is OK but usability is key” – this was made in particular reference to the success of craigslist.com which is not a visually appealing site (but actually a very easy to use site)

 

“Make sure the ecosystem is ready for your idea” – youtube would have failed if it had launched, say, 2 years before. It was the broadband penetration ecosystem that propelled its success.

 

“User experience Vs Ease of building” Always user experience wins. Essentially stick to a great interaction concept even if you have an alternate interaction that helps you launch quickly.

 

“Your customers leave you more often when *you* do something badly than what someone else does great”

 

“Failing fast is better “- never underestimate the importance of concept testing your features with you target consumers through dummy products/mocks before the development process

 

“Don’t do a feature death march on engineering” – give them enough bandwidth to stabilize and improve the performance/stability of the current product.

 

“You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression” you can read my post on landing pages.

 

Obviously there was a lot of discussion around product requirements, release planning, concept testing techniques and more – I will leave you to attend the course to learn about that.

Some book recommendations.

 “Inmates are running the asylum “by Alan Cooper 

“Don’t make me think“by Steve Krug

Tags: internet, product management, product marketing, product planning, Technology, web 2.0