Does product management slow down your company?

What Causes Your Business to Be Slow?

Paul Young put out the call for the third annual You Might Be A Product Manager… list.  If you are spending your holiday wondering if Jason Calacanis is right, and product management is actually preventing your company from being successful, you might be a product manager.

Facebook’s success — and mistakes — are based on its developer-driven culture, not because Zuckerberg is some evil mastermind.

The Zuckerberg Doctrine: Developers design products with significantly improved speed and functionality compared to product managers and designers, outweighing potential mistakes and drawbacks.

Jason Calacanis, Launch newsletter 002

Sound like link bait?  Maybe, but you’re probably a product manager :).  Jason’s put his money where his mouth is – he changed the way things are done at Mahalo (his human-curated search / answers company).

In under 30 days, we completely overhauled our product-development process, removing everything between the developer and iterating on the product.

We eliminated positions and process. We made it clear the developers were to make the decisions even if those decisions resulted in a developer being 50 percent slower because they were busy *thinking* about the product (as opposed to just transcribing features from the product manager wireframes).

Jason Calacanis, Launch newsletter 002

As you read through the details of the analysis in Mr. Calacanis’ newsletter, you’ll see that his position is not ultimately as generalized as the above quotes appear to be – Mr. Calacanis (who I’ve seen, and to whom I’ve listened for several years, but never met) is talking specifically about startups.  However, he uses AOL, Yahoo, MySpace and Google as his “bad” examples – not exactly startups.

I think this logical flaw may be leading Mr. Calacanis to demonize the wrong bad actors.

ProductCamp Austin 6

If you’re planning to attend ProductCamp Austin 6 – January 15th, 2011 (register here if you haven’t already), then consider attending a session that John Milburn, Roger Cauvin, and I are going to host – discussing this topic.  If you can’t attend, then jump into the conversation here.  John and Roger and I have been talking about this and exchanging some ideas since the newsletter came out – and we really know how much better ideas get when we open the conversation up to the community.  We’re looking forward to doing that at product camp, and I’m writing this to open it up now – so please, chime in!

Implicit Product Decisions

When I was still writing software and leading teams that were writing software, I would occasionally point out that all software is designed – even if someone sits down and just starts typing code.  There is, at the minimum, implicit design happening in the mind of the programmer.  It might not be “good” design, but there is always design.  There is always a method to the madness, just not always a considered method.  The same is true of product management.

• The creation of every feature and capability, in every product, is preceded by the notion that having this capability is a good idea.  That’s what product managers do – decide which capabilities a product should have.
• Eliminating product managers does not eliminate product management.

If “developer led” companies are still doing product management, how then, are they moving faster?  Mr. Calacanis addresses valid points – his “bad examples” do seem to move pretty slowly, and his “good examples” do seem to move faster.  So what’s really different?  John and Roger and I will be framing the discussion at ProductCamp around how to move faster, and not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I might describe what Mahalo has apparently done as follows:

• Mahalo, with product managers involved in product decisions, was not moving as fast as Mr. Calacanis desired.  So they reorganized so that product managers were no longer involved in the process – in hopes of having a faster process.  Mr. Calacanis indicated that in a trade-off between “better” and “faster,” he would prefer “faster.”

Agility

The core of the agile development philosophy is – “fail fast. learn. improve.”

All of the other stuff in the implementations of agile comes back to this – consider the main ideas in the agile manifesto*

• People over process: empowerment to fail and learn and improve.
• Value working software: learning is experiential, and you can’t fail or improve without shipping.
• Collaboration: You have to understand someone else’s problem before you can solve it.  Too many products emerge from insular and isolated “exploration.”
• Encourage, don’t inhibit change:  If you punish failure you prevent learning. If you prevent that new knowledge from being applied, you make learning irrelevant.

*Agreed – those aren’t the words used in the manifesto.  Same ideas, though.

When you talk about business agility, while the mechanics might be different, the goals are the same.  Fail fast.  Learn.  Improve.

Mr. Calacanis, in my interpretation, is saying that this is exactly what he wants the Mahalo team to do.  I applaud that goal.

Does he have to “kill all the product managers” in order to infuse his company with (business) agility?

Is product management the antithesis of agility?  By definition, product management is still happening – just without product managers.  Maybe the product management process has room for improvement…

Market Driven

As a good product manager, you are market driven.  What does that mean to agility?

• Fail Fast.  Maybe you’re making decisions that delay launches until you know “the right product.”  That would hurt agility.
• Lean. Are you listening to your customers, and learning from them?  Great!
• Improve. Does what you’ve learned lead to trying something different, with a hypothesis that it will be better this time?

OK, so being market driven will help your company learn and improve.  That’s the up-side.  It may also enable (but not cause) some corporate dysfunction. If your organization punishes failure, or is afraid of mis-steps, and you’re market driven, you have already heard this conversation – don’t (schedule | design | release) until we get [feedback X] or [insight Y].

A tight coupling with your market is a powerful tool.  It can be used for good (learning) or evil (avoid failure).

Whew.  Good to know that being market driven is not the source of the problem.  An organization that is afraid of failure is the problem.

Mahalo’s experiment may work – Mr. Calacanis clearly intends to encourage the “fail fast” element.  So, when his developers are doing product management, they will have an opportunity to succeed by being market driven.

Bureaucracy

In fairness, Mr. Calacanis is really only prescribing the “no product managers” approach for startups.  Startups are not particularly bureaucratic.  Perhaps Mahalo was becoming bureaucratic.  It is easy to see the big companies mentioned in the newsletter as being rife with bureaucracy.  Even if you could fail fast, learn, and improve in a world of t-crossing and sign-offs, your definition of “fast” would not match your competitors.

Piloting your company would be like flying a Cessna twin-prop airplane in a world of super-sonic Gulfstream jets.

How are product managers introducing overhead into your product creation process?  What parts of product management are “not worth the delays?”

There are very real “slow things down” activities in the product creation process.

• Some activities can be removed.
• Some activities can be improved.
• Most activities can be done in parallel with the product creation process, eliminating delays.

What Have You Seen?

There are a lot of stories from the trenches out there – what are you seeing?  Have you tackled this already?  How did you make it better.

I hope that our session focuses on helping attendees, in a very real way, make their product creation process more effective, and make their businesses more agile.

Of course, we don’t have to wait until January 15th – we can start talking about it right now…

ProductCamp Austin is here again!  The Spring 2010 session is this Saturday, 27 March 2010 at the AT&T Conference Center on the UT campus in downtown Austin.  Make sure and say hi when you’re there!

ProductCamp

ProductCamp is an unconference for product managers and product marketing professionals.  This is the fourth time Austin has had one – we were fast followers of the wildly successful Silicon Valley PCamp in 2008, which Rich Mironov was instrumental in getting off the ground and growing.  Paul Young is the guy who brought together the people in Austin to get our events off the ground.  Paul graciously deflects the credit for getting things going, but he deserves it regardless.

Check out Paul’s great description of ProductCamp. Here’s the key paragraph, if you’re on the fence about attending:

The sessions and networking are the main reason that people keep coming back. Over three ProductCamps, we’ve achieved over 98% of participants answering “yes” to the questions “would you come back to ProductCamp” and “would you recommend ProductCamp to a peer?” This high customer satisfaction is why our local community loves to come out – in droves. Last time, we had over 500 sign up and over 300 participate. This time we are limited by our venue and won’t be able to hold more than 300 or so, so register today and reserve your space. It’s free of course.

Sign Up Now

Today (Thursday) is the last chance to sign up, to give folks a few minutes to finalize planning for space, make name tags, etc.

You can sign up at the official website for PCamp Austin.  The doors open at 8:30, things get started at 9:00, sessions are from 10-4 (with provided lunch at noon), then awards and a happy hour at 4:30.

View Larger Map

Sessions

41 Sessions have been proposed for this ProductCamp, so make sure and come, vote for your favorites, then enjoy them!

Leaf Launch

Very exciting news for this PCamp – Paul Young is launching his new product, Leaf!

From Paul: “Information overload is a problem that every product manager has.  Between email, phone, IM, tweets, status updates, geolocations, and keeping track of who knows what, just communicating can feel like a full-time job.  Social networking has amplified the problem – we now have access to more information than ever before – but how’s that working out for us?”

Does that sound like you?  You should attend his session, then.  I certainly will.

See you there!

Austin’s 3rd UnConference for product managers and product marketing managers is coming up on August 15t.  If you’re in Austin or can come to Austin, you should definitely plan on participating – it’s free, and a great opportunity to network, share, and learn.

ProductCamp – What Is It?

The first ProductCamp was started in the San Francisco Bay Area by Rich Mironov and the folks at Enthiosys in March 2008.  The largest one so far had 375 participants in the Bay Area, and the most recent one was last weekend in New York City.  As I type this, the ProductCamp Austin has 217 signups and 26 proposed sessions – less than a week after the announcement.

ProductCamp is a free, collaborative, unconference about product marketing and management.  ProductCamp is a bunch of smart, passionate people coming together to discuss, debate, and collaborate on the issues they face every day.  Everyone brings different experiences and leveraging that collective knowledge is what makes ProductCamp special – and something you can’t get anywhere else.

There are ProductCamps happening in more locations every day: San Francisco Bay, Austin, Toronto, New York City, Research Triange Park, Atlanta, Seattle, Boston, and maybe some more that I’m missing.  Someone created a web page that lists upcoming product camps (although it doesn’t provide any other information yet [if you're the owner of that site, comment below and let folks know how we can help connect the other city-specific sites to yours]).  There’s also a list of “all” past product camps on the barcamp.org wiki.  I know it is currently missing some of the events, but hopefully will emerge as the canonical list.  There’s also a newly created facebook fan page for all of the ProductCamps. It has a link to the Toronto ProductCamp fan page, and to the Austin ProductCamp fan page and hopefully soon, to any others that have been created.

If you know of a past ProductCamp that is missing, please update that wiki page (or contact me and I will update it).

Check out Paul Young’s recent article about Product Camp Austin and what to expect (if you haven’t attended one in the past).  Paul also gave a webinar yesterday about ProductCamp – with an introduction for new-to-ProductCamp people, and guidance for how to start a ProductCamp in your area.  You can download his slides and listen to the 40-minute audio track at the link.  Thanks to Ryma and Val Workman for hosting the webinar!

ProductCamp – How Does It Work?

Volunteers in each city put a lot of time into organizing the events, finding venues, soliciting donations to cover costs, encouraging people to participate, creating awareness of the events, setting up, tearing down, etc.  The event is free for people who attend – all that is asked is that people who attend help out.  Ideally, that means hosting a session (a presentation, roundtable, panel, workshop, etc) or participating in one; or it could mean helping out before, during, or after the session.

ProductCamp – What’s Going On?

There isn’t quite critical mass for any one site that aggregates all of the ProductCamp information.  This is an emergent phenomenon – and if you’re reading this after Jul 23rd 2009, the links above may not be the best ones.  For now, Twitter has emerged as the best way to see what’s going on with product camps.  The way to keep up is to search for hash-tags that the different product camps are using, find people who are tweeting about the product camps, and do some discovery leg-work.  Try searching Twitter for any of the following: productcamp, #pcamp, #pca09, #pct2, #pcampnyc, and certainly some others [add to the comments below].

ProductCamp Austin – How’s It Shaping Up?

As of this morning, for ProductCamp Austin Summer 2009 (main wiki page, facebook page, twitter search term, registration page, session-proposal page), we have 219 people registered, and 26 sessions proposed.  One thing we’re doing this year is capturing a demand signal from people as they register – specifically, what topic areas would they be interested in seeing presentations about.

We asked (are asking) people to select the three topic areas of most interest to them, from the list:

• Marketing
• Agile
• Requirements
• Product Strategy
• Career
• Other

Here’s a snapshot of the data at the moment:

Larger (and current) images of both graphs are maintained on the session-proposal page of the ProductCamp Austin Summer 2009 wiki.  This information is intended to inform the people who are proposing sessions – it is a demand signal.  There are no quotas by topic area, no requirement that sessions be in a particular area, etc.  Just information to help presenters pick a topic area (when they are undecided).

ProductCamp Austin – Finding Presenters

We’re driving participation “top down” because we’re creatures of habit.  However, what I personally believe will be more effective is for you to get people to host sessions at ProductCamp Austin.

• Do you know someone who is a great presenter with something to say about product management or product marketing?  Beg them to present.
• Do you work with people who have great insights about a particular area?  Bully them into participating in a panel (and volunteer to run the panel).
• Have you met someone who is facing a particular challenge and is looking for answers?  Convince them to organize a roundtable on the topic (and convince people with experiences to attend).
• Have you learned from someone who is a great teacher?  Cajole them into running a 50 minute workshop where people can learn something valuable and tangible.

Or of course, when you fit into any of these categories, volunter :).  And when asked by someone else, be flattered.  And say yes!

Paul Young (ptyoung on Twitter, Author of Product Beautiful) is the driving force behind organizing Austin’s product camps – thanks Paul!

For you product managers out there – here are a couple upcoming productcamp unconferences.  For you business analysts, here’s an excuse to do a little domain modeling and practice your UML class diagram skills.

Upcoming ProductCamps

There are at least four productcamp unconferences coming up in the near future.  I’ve been able to attend (and host sessions at) both of the productcamp Austin sessions, and they were great.  If you can make it to a session near you, you definitely should.  And if you go, you should help out – these are entirely free, and their quality directly relates to the amount of volunteer support that the attendees give.

1. ProductCampNYC – Jul 18th 2009 @ The Downtown Association, New York City, NY.  More info.
2. ProductCampAustin – Aug 2009 (exact day and venue TBD).  More info.
3. ProductCampToronto – (everything TBD).  More info.
4. ProductCampSeattle – Oct 10th 2009 @ Amdocs.  More info.

Check out the comments on this article too – as updates happen in different cities, I’m sure folks will post them here.

[Note: I updated the venue for the NYC product camp on 10 Jun 2009]

If you’re on twitter, you can search for #pcampnyc, #pca, for NYC and Austin productcamp info (respectively).  Or follow @ProductCampNYC.

Session Planning

One of the interesting things about productcamp is that it is a barcamp-style unconference.  That means it is free, and in theory, there is no centralized planning of sessions.  However, there’s a lot of planning that goes into having these unplanned sessions.

Roger Cauvin is one of the volunteers helping to organize the next productcamp Austin, with a focus on sessions.  He and I met over some seriously tasty Greek food at Tino’s Greek Cafe in Austin yesterday for lunch to begin planning for the sessions.  Our discussion focused around how the attendees will best benefit from the sessions, and what we can do to maximize that benefit.

One idea that came up was looking at addressing the frustration that people feel when there are two simultaneous sessions that they want to go see.  At previous productcamps, we used a very simple, on-the-fly scheduling approach:

1. We created index cards for each session and stuck them on the wall.
2. Each person had a few (3?) sticky notes, and stuck them under each session card.
3. The ones that got the most were lined up in the same room (to reduce conflicts in the popular sessions).
4. The rest of the sessions filled up the room/time slots without any particular optimization.
5. We did this sequencing in a couple minutes after everyone quickly “voted” with their post-it notes.

We learned, from “customer” feedback from the first two sessions that there is room to improve:

• People were still expressing frustration about “good session” conflicts.
• We also noticed a drop-off in attendance as people left before the end of the day – more attendees for earlier sessions.

So, if we’re going to improve session planning, one of the things we need to do is understand the details of sessions.  This is where domain modeling comes in.

We can create a UML class diagram that represents the domain of planning for (and attending) sessions.  This serves as an example of applying the business analysis techniques to gain insight into a problem domain before attempting to define a solution.

We know the following things about the domain:

• There are a limited number of rooms available for sessions.
• There are a limited number of time-slots available for sessions.
• Each session has a topic and presenter(s), and happens in a single room at a single time-slot.
• Each session has multiple attendees.
• Each attendee wants to attend multiple sessions.
• Each attendee has a prioritized list of sessions they expect will benefit them if attended.
• Each attendee can only attend one session per time-slot.
• Each attendee wants to maximize the benefit that they get from the productcamp.

[larger image]

The diagram above shows the relationships that will inform the design of any solutions.  For more on how to create UML class diagrams, check out our tutorial series on domain modeling.  One challenge of domain modeling is that there are often multiple ways to represent the same relationships.  With a goal of “understand the domain” – how would you model this differently?