Archive of Product Management Articles

No, not that kind of camp.

Product Camp

Prioritization is about maximizing the value you provide to your customers. When you have multiple sets of customers with different priorities, what do you do? You could try and find the lowest-common-denominator, and please everyone a little bit. But that would be the wrong thing to do - by trying to please everyone, you fail to delight anyone.

We’re dedicating our “blogging time” this week to doing some infrastructure upgrades - we have to address some security issues on the site. Until we get through these changes, we’ll be recycling some of our existing content. For our recent readers, it will be “new to you” and for our long time readers, we appreciate your patience. Today we look at one of our better received articles on active listening.

Instead of

Prioritize the present when planning your product. Neglecting the future is almost as bad as over-emphasizing it. The key is to incorporate your plans for the future correctly by making them play second fiddle to the present needs of your market. Serve both today and tomorrow - but prioritize today.

Michael Arrington has 2400+ unread emails in his inbox. And he needs someone to fix it.

If you are the person with the idea to save us all, send me an email and tell me all about it. Actually, strike that. Drop by my house and tell me all about it. I don’t want your message to get lost in my inbox.

Michael Arrington

Michael is looking for the email equivalent of a magic diet pill. He can’t change his behavior, so he needs a dietary supplement. The dieting-market is huge, and products succeed playing on that emotion for dieters. Is email management the same?

We read a lot about the value of listening to your customers and understanding your markets. We don’t hear as much about what happens when you ignore your customers. Thanks to documents exposed as part of a class action lawsuit, we get to see just how bad it can be. Maybe even billions of dollars.

Do you recognize this early logo from Amazon.com? Future Now has a great article detailing how Amazon evolved their “add to shopping cart” implementation. From reviewing this summary of the evolution of one feature, we can see that Amazon decided there was value in reinvention. The improved the way their product did something over time. Have you?

Ask A Good Product Manager is a new blog just launched by Jeff Lash, who also authors How To Be A Good Product Manager, one of our favorite blogs.

We’ve been promoting use cases as the right way to approach agile requirements, and in a recent article, Alistair Cockburn stresses the importance of use cases. Over the last three years, he has found that teams that avoid use cases consistently run into the same three problems. We defer, of course, to Alistair as the expert. But we’ve been independently promoting this practice too. So today, we get a cookie!

A successful agile team requires someone on the team to act as the voice of the customer, someone to lead the developers, someone to lead quality assurance, and someone to organize, coordinate, and assure execution. For an agile team to succeed in an enterprise ripe with political resistance to agile, someone has to be the “voice of the team” as well.

You can approach this by classically assigning roles and responsibilities - but that isn’t the only way. Agile teams are most effective when they have specializing generalists who can mutably adapt to the immediate needs.