Product Management and User Experience Thoughts @product-ux - Tumblr Blog

New Marketing Thoughts

Something I was convinced of , and is slightly a different way to think about marketing (particularly segmentation/demographics) has been going on in my mind for a while.

One, I was skeptical of demographic factors playing a large role in customer preferences, as has always been thought of and taught in traditional marketing.

Two, putting the users/customers in buckets based on age, location, sex, income demographics is combining different personalities in same brackets. As Avinash Kaushik would say often, aggregate data is crap. There has to be a better way to divide the group of people.

Third, I am a huge believer in data and observing users. It is one of the concepts/tools in 'Design Thinking' where I was originally introduced to the concept of 'customer journey'. I have always relied on either analytics or usability studies which I founded at our company to make my conclusions.

Yet, there has to be a way to divide the customer base, if not per demographics. That's how 'personas' were formed. User stories were an offset of these.

Going a step further*, some new ( since 2011, but at least after my traditional MBA I can say !) literature focuses solely on 'Job to be done'. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6496.html is a great start. There is a whole collection on Medium dedicated to this collection. Even before learning this, I have always addressed this as users go to your site or launch your app to find an answer to their question. Other than social networking applications, where the need is more emotional or that spans offline, most other sites are present to solve a problem, to answer a question - and they are only thought of when the need comes. I think of my friend and launch Facebook, but for other apps, I think of job - to know score, to know news , to make a to do list.

Jobs to be done is also a neat way to explain something that is beyond many people's understanding - especially those who have had traditional MBA and no experience. Lot of marketing material talk about market research, yet lot of other literature and modern marketing talk about talking to users/customers. They deride with an improperly attributed quote to Ford which suggests that Ford thought of market research would have resulted in faster horse. This left my ex-colleague confused. He was just out of traditional MBA with no prior experience in business or product marketing. The key is not asking users what they want, instead to understand their problem and to solve it. It is market research but in a different way.

To Christensen's comment in the book about data only showing the past, there is still an opportunity to test the future market. This is at the core of Lean Startup , where your only purpose is to test your assumption about market. Test, learn , optimize - before the big launch.

It is so great that my thoughts/passion about 'app is an answer' , ' watch users to understand their problem/needs and not ask them feature directly', 'design thinking', 'analytics/metrics based product management', 'usability studies', 'lean startup' - all nicely make great coherent sense together and around 'Jobs to be done' paradigm.

This is a great time, hope the 'Jobs to be done' succeeds in changing conversations so that they are more customer focused.

* (in my mind, although some literature pitches job to be done as 'against' user stories - which I don't completely agree. I will admit though, how using 'user stories' makes everyone think about user consciously, changing the language makes it easier to refocus and in case focus on job to be done)

#user focus

Killers and deaths everywhere

I install lot of apps on my mobile and tablet. But recently I have changed. I am trying to avoid installing apps if I am going to use them occasionally. It just consumes space in my phone, and there is no way I am going to find it when I need anyways. Searching for app is so not intuitive and obvious, I would rather search for things online.

The only advantage to storing apps is that I can avoid future logins.

Some of the apps I got fed up of , a year ago and I never installed them include Twitter (crashed my phone) and LinkedIn (multiple annoying notifications for likes etc) and their mobile website is annoying.

What gives ?

Apps are killing web

http://blog.codinghorror.com/app-pocalypse-now/ - This captures many other points nicely. I hope something changes.

Apps are only needed - if interaction is huge such as games or if you are going to use very frequently - daily if not couple of times a day.

Notifications are killing apps

There is just one exception for a requirement of an app , that is possibly going to shape things in future - notifications.

There are countless apps already that I will not actively seek them. I have already stopped opening my Gmail inbox. I don't launch many other apps unless when I really need them. Instead I just rely on notifications.

http://blog.intercom.io/the-end-of-apps-as-we-know-them/

Apps are killing web

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-web-is-dying-apps-are-killing-it-1416169934?mod=WSJ_hp_RightTopStories

That's an article, ironical, because it's behind a regwall/paywall. Don't know who killed whom and why.

On Google Glass

A high profile keynote was interrupted, another man running onto keynote with lot of energy - crowd goes berserk. A live demo of the product is being shown to launch the product - unlike any live demo this time with professional skydivers. It's Google Glass's unveiling and that which gets huge press over the next few months.

I was right there in the audience - while excited for a product that worked seamlessly on a demo day (Win95 anyone), it's huge 'potential'. After few minutes of watching the video - I was more on the side of underwhelmed. There was no value proposition - it was pretty much left to developers who would build companion products/apps - that was fair as it was a developer conference anyways. Yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I couldn't see it more than a hands-free camera. I even tweeted that and got replies from my friends that I am not excited/impressed , contrary to general public. I wasn't.

I thought of few other use cases where hands free camera would be helpful (in lab, hospitals etc) but none convinced me that Google Glass was going to be THE device for them. It was not solving a problem, or fulfilling a need they didn't realize they had.

Few months later, thanks to the company, I bought a Google Glass. Wore it for couple of days. Yet I continued to be as unimpressed. I had paid $600 to get ride of my glasses , and I didn't want to wear. I realized half the people who are being excited for glass, had never worn one in their life. Wearing glass is painful and uncomfortable. Why would I want to put through that misery again , for evidently small benefit or no benefit ?

Let's talk about benefits - as one of my friends (who tried couple of times) said, it helps in a quick check of time. TIME ? That's an useless use case, no matter if she checked time for 1000 times a day. Battery was terrible - however it could have improved in final versions. Apps - maps was interesting, yet not a compelling when I can always reach for my phone. Searching and reading ? Not impressed.

Anything I thought of, I wasn't convinced that GG was going to be make the experience better. The value difference when taken into account of inconvenience was even smaller. Even hands free camera wasn't a smooth experience. Nothing was killer use case.

Next year I went to conference again, by this time - privacy concerns, driving with glass concerns, seemingly anti-social concerns, geek attitude, etc was all well documented. Including a widely understood term and hashtag #glasshole. I saw few people wearing it around in the conference. I asked the use cases - some didn't even have battery charged but thought it was cool to walk around with them. What !! One person said how they use it constantly and it helps them in their labs.

There was no news of Google Glass from the podium next year ( nor was there about Google+).

I did receive the updated Google Glass, the one I haven't worn once.

Google Glass will go down in my history as one more tech prediction that I got right.

Recently a flurry of articles have been calling demise :

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2469916,00.asp

http://www.zdnet.com/the-end-is-nigh-for-google-glass-7000028688/

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Latest-News-Wires/2014/1117/Is-this-the-end-of-Google-Glass-Some-early-believers-think-so

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/14/us-google-glass-insight-idUSKCN0IY18E20141114

Good :

After spending all the above words to say how bad this product was, what can be good. Well there are few:

1. I loved Google for attempting something so out there, for investing money and trying out something that got a lot of people talking. Even if bad publicity, GG almost got as much press if not more and attention that any normal Apple product would get. That is saying a lot.

2. Created one of the first 'wearables' that may or may not be defining the space for others to follow.

3. Great support and community building, campaigns, pre-release - lot of good learning for Google.

Questions:

What was the need you were trying to address ? Problem you were trying to solve ?

Any user research / testing happened whether people would want to wear around a glass and spend time ?

Finally, any sense of what scale did you plan to reach ? It is not a mass product, and would you really want to create something that is not mass adopted , at least because you are Google.

#product

Roadmap and customer meeting

Over the last few days, I attended two meetings of two hours each. One was a roadmap planning with the PMs, and the other was meeting a customer/partner - more of a distributor of our brand and apps but we both get revenue advantage.

In the roadmap meeting, it was almost 1 hour 50 minute when the first concern/mention of customer value. Well I could have brought it up, but I wanted to play along. All the roadmap items except the one which actually brought in the "customer" mention, were actually already decided by "management" team or an another internal team. To be fair, in all possibility they might have already figured out 'customer value'. Also, to be fair, many of these items are more about growth ( expansion of countries or localization).

But there are problems here - all employees, no matter who, need to be thinking about end consumer. If some other team has already evaluated, it needs to be known to all employees - at least the ones who are implementing. This is about transparency, communication, clarity and about empowerment.

All meetings should talk about end user, no matter how obvious it is. At times it is going to be uncomfortable - but there is no harm in emphasizing the users/customers. It is better than losing the focus.

And finally, during the roadmap discussion effort needs to be brought into discussion along with value. Without this one can not accurately prioritze the features. Instead what ended up was a laundry list left to higher management to prioritize - who would prioritize based on the value or importance ( may or may not considering end user value, but definitely not using effort).

For the sake of simplicity, let's say our partner is our customer and end user is their customer.

Second meeting was comparatively interesting. Sales team constantly talked about "value" to our customer (partner), who did also bring up value or end user discussion couple of times. It was much earlier (around 1 hour mark) that this happened.

It is easy to note that incentive pays a big role here - sales team is incentivized to create better deals for their clients and the company. However it is difficult to measure product team's success without clear goals and ability to track them. And tracking a product success along various angles such as revenue, increase in competitive space, increase in brand, user experience and many others are especially difficult in a consumer application space.

On the other hand, my other complaints did surface in this meeting (refer this post) http://product-ux.com/post/100933204865/consumer-centric-user-focus-in-product-business . Most of the product / business ideas were about 'build it they will come attitude' or based on the assumptions and lacked either consumer research or data or experimentation. The confidence boggles me, but then we were talking about gazillion billion dollar company (not that they are always right, I have often found mistakes in their marketing or products, but they have been successful nevertheless).

And finally, one of my favorite Dilbert strips.

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-05-07/

On Amazon Echo

Amazon introduced a new device this week - Echo. It is a voice activated bluetooth speaker. My reactions to it are mixed.

Good:

I am happy and I like it because Amazon created a new device and a new use case. I always cringed about voice activated devices, and thought in-car is the only valid use case but never thought about in-house.

The fact that Amazon of all the companies thought and came up with this box is very interesting - for it's uses, Google should have been the obvious one to release this but Microsoft or Yahoo[for search], Spotify, iTunes, Google Music[for music], Apple[in general] would have been good places for this device to come from. Or even Evernote ?

Also, one more device that is not a 'personal' but a shared device interests me.

Bad:

Voice activated devices hardly make sense compared to the hype they manage to create - be it Siri, Cortona, Google Now's voice search (which I hate that they failed to brand) or be it on Google Wear/Glass. Who talks to devices - it is such annoying thing to do, and there are only two cases when you would do it - when you are alone, or when your hands are tied. Or make it 'and' instead of 'or'. Of course, the surroundings need to be silent for it to work. It would be interesting to see how these devices would take off ( would Google and Apple be left behind if this device becomes a success ?) (Siri was long supposed to kill Google, last I checked, Siri has been a good pastime and nothing otherwise. Thiis was also something I predicted when Siri was introduced).

Second, how does this add to Amazon ? No one will ever shop from a voice activated device on Amazon. (Or may be once a set list of items is ready, Alexa ship me item 4). [Those including journalists who suggest this is to shop on Amazon don't understand Amazon isn't just a ecom company anymore. Most ideal usecase for this would be Amazon Music]. So, other than Amazon music, the way this would help Amazon is to create shopping lists ( are reminder lists so popular on Amazon ?). Do they want to increase Prime membership ? Would the device such as this cause a dent in the membership - similar to Fire phone bundling with Prime I am not sure if the device increases Prime membership or just targeted to Prime members. I think it is latter.

Pricing: $200 is probably absurd, so let's consider Amazon is only targeting Prime members. $100 is decent pricing, but not Amazonian pricing. A sub 60 or 70 would have been ideal pricing.

Problem:

As a good product manager, I can't not think what problem is this product solving ? Let's look at the marketing:

"Always ready, connected and fast. Just ask" - there is nothing new here than other voice activated products such as Siri or Google Now voice search.

More details include key terms such as:

* Info, music, news, weather

* Hands free

Two other bullets about getting smarter, voice recognition across room aren't key because they are necessary features if this device has to get any traction.

From the above two points, through other marketing material there are two distinct use cases:

1) To ask for information (definition, information, news, weather)

2) To make Alexa do some work (note taking/reminders, play music)

#1 is usually what Google, Siri have done and done well. Traditional voice search. Search has traditionally been monetized by ads, and voice doesn't really a good platform to monetize it.

#2 is not done by many products (there are personal assistants in handheld devices that can do this including S voice, and Siri). But this is where there is business opportunity for Amazon. A small robot in everyone's house.

What the marketing material is not emphasizing (and they should) is that this is a "in-home" "entertainment" "shared" device & bluetooth speaker.

Of all the things "search" , "music" , "note taking" - it would be interesting to see which use case will take off. My bet is it would be 70% music, 25% search and may be 5% reminders.

Update:

After thinking more, there is a huge potential opportunity if Echo opens it's platform to work with IoT. See this video: http://t.co/z5I96Uwuqy

And also, phone integration would be very powerful.

And lastly, what data or customer research went into creating this product. That may not be negative, but I am just curious similar to wondering which search engine is powering this technology behind Echo.

It is an intriguing device and very happy Amazon is innovating on devices where others have failed even though Amazon failed on phone.

How to operate

I have followed many startup posts/stories and these days Tue and Thurs are my favorite days due to http://startupclass.samaltman.com/ ! Very good class today from Keith. (post updated after a day after annotations were available)

Many things resonated with me, few highlights:

1. Hire/ promote specialists to managers. People management can be learned later but the skills can't be. If a non-expert is made to manage experts just because he is good with people management, it is very demotivating.

2. Focus on A+ things even though they are hard instead of B+ which may be slightly easier. Together with singular focus, which is important in smaller companies.

3. Culture is the framework through which decisions are made.

4. Calendar management, weekly meetings where employee sets agenda, weekly once or biweekly. Interestingly my meeting with my manager used to be like this.

5. Thoughts on "editing", "writing" and delegating. When to delegate and when to micromanage.

6. His thoughts about open-ness/transparency. I know that Buffer has pretty great open philosophy including compensation.

7. Metrics, dashboard and the importance of anomalies.

Lot to learn from this talk.

Came across this book called 'Hooked' and checked out this video. Very interesting and I preordered the book. Preordering also gives some bonus content here : hookmodel.com

I am very curious to read this book.

Slides are here

http://www.slideshare.net/nireyal/slideshelf

#book #reading #product #ux

This answer is brilliant and should be mandatory reading for MBAs and Product Managers. Product and Marketing are both equally important according to me, although I know people place different weights on them depending upon their biases. A strong product without marketing is as useless as a strong marketing without a good product.

Nothing says that more than Apple Pay (I'm not that convinced about Apple watch, but that's for another day) in the recent news. As many other features on Android, Google Wallet has been around for years only to surface on Apple this week. (Other features such as widgets, 3rd party keyboards - few other things that made into iOS8 recently). However it never got the mass adoption that Apple Pay has and will get. (1M activations in 72 hours).

The reason is simple - not only Apple nails it in marketing (as seen in the above link), but also nails it in the product and execution. Apple released with many credit card issuers, banks, merchants lined up on day 1; made it so that none of carriers can block Apple Pay citing their proprietary payment solutions (Verizon and others blocked Google Wallet ! Google was left to use Google Wallet only on Nexus devices).

I think the problem is with the culture of design/experience first approach by Apple. They look at a problem, and then attack with a solution. It doesn't hurt that they are amongst the most valuable companies to recruit talented engineers. However, Google is primarily engineering company and they build great products - partnership, negotiations and marketing are afterthoughts.

#culture #product #marketing

Tsu

Soon after Ello , came along Tsu -another social network, but the one promises to share revenue with the users. At least the interface is very familiar, easy to use and already has Android app (which is rare these days with startups and if I see Android app, it seems like startup has been through some validation and is more stable).

But is 'money' enough motivator ? Other products have failed with only money as motivation. But Tsu combines both money and social validation that is a huge factor on Fb.

I honestly think uprooting FB is near impossible atleast in the next few years, despite the product being extremely confusing and complicated to use by many in the world. Whatsapp won with the ease of use and does one thing really well - easy communication. FB has too many business units and will continue to stay strong.

But social networking is more than a product, it is all about network. Orkut in India was upstaged by Facebook in just a couple of years, so it is theoritically possible for FB to be won over by some other network, but just that it is highly unlikely.

Yet I am curious to see what happens in this space, because honestly I can use some other network as long as my network of friends an family is there.

I find myself searching for this video every now and then to reference and reinforce my memory. Thus posting it here.

Ello

I signed up for Ello the other day after requesting for invites on my Facebook. There was something about that ! But once I signed up, I wasn't sure what to do - it didn't seem like it was obvious, plus I had no network. Now, it's not the first time that has happened - I was one of the early adopters for many other sites as well such as Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku and many others..and it takes a while for network to build up if that platform is successful.

I kept thinking though - what would be the business model for a social media. What upgrades would I be willing to pay for ? There are very few other business models on internet that have been as successful and as common as an ad-based model.

Advertising no matter how people hate it, has given us, the consumers enormous free software and tools that wouldn't have been possible otherwise. It is a shame that a ton of people don't 'get' advertising business model, despite using the very same products every day.

While I was suspicious of the business model and Ello, I came across this eloquent post :

http://stratechery.com/2014/ello-consumer-friendly-business-models/

Consumer centric/ User focus in Product/Business meetings

These days I am counting time until when someone else explicitly raises one of the two questions that are critical to building good products. Product managers are supposed to breathe this, yet I see again and again, this fails on the leaders (most of whom are inexperienced because they didn't grow up the ranks of Product Management). The two questions I would like to hear are

1. What is the problem we are trying to solve

2. What is the value to the end user / customer

There are many subsets and extensions of these questions that make sense, but at the least I would like to hear these questions. Often it is 60-70% into a meeting, if not never that I get to hear these questions. Now, being a consumer facing company in a commodotized market it is often difficult to represent or think of end user, but it is very essential. There is an implicit understanding of whom we are serving, but making it explicit and obvious is so important because we get lost in conversations.

In one of the recent meeting with partners (a distribution channel for our product - but who use our content to make money for them & us in a revenue sharing agreement) I again realized this. It was because I thought their discussion would at least be more end user focused because they are one step closer to the user than us, however our meeting was lost in discussion about how to make more money for both of us. It is for this reason I am not a big fan of advertising business model, but as I said in some other post, we have been thankful to ads in a huge way.

Relatedly, three attitudes that I don't like, I end up observing are

1) Relying on assumptions rather than data/ willingness to test the assumption

2) Build it, they will come attitude.

3) Lack of scale

In these days when the analytics tools have become commodotized, it is still a shame that people consciously don't think of testing something. Agreed that there is a huge development cycle either with apps and even more with hardware such as phones, yet it is no excuse not to test the hypothesis.

On the other hand, there is ton of data that is collected, but not everyone understands how to put that to good use.

"Build it" attitude is too common. And almost all the time it is based on assumptions. The other day I was in an IoT meeting which went on for hours showing off all these cool products which are either in prototype or in test phase - half the audience was awed because they didn't realize tech can do such cool stuff. The other half was busy thinking how to insert our data or content into such products and how to sell and make money. Neither one was wondering if this is really of value to the user, whether this is going to sell, and if it did whether it had the capability to gain traction and sell in volume.

There are so many ideas (whether in the industry or that can be put into our products) that don't have the promise/scale that it can make an impact or it can be a differentiator. Yet people praise it, pass around emails, hold brainstorm and push for estimates, and if lucky into implementation. I strongly believe innovation is required and every new idea is interesting - but innovation and scale shouldn't be applied to the same product.

My proposal : separate the innovation, create a test bed, test rigorously.

Once test is successful, think of scale and $. These two should be separate teams, separate products, separate mindset.

Fire Phone - Strategy analysis

Recently there were several speculated reports about how few (30K) Fire Phones were sold in a month of time. Given how closely I follow the industry, it was not a big surprise to me. In fact I had predicted a year ago that Amazon shouldn't enter into phones where margins are thin, competition is high and it's too late.

But I'm sure it was not even a surprise to any common man, most of whom would have ended up asking a question - what Fire phone ?

Then how do executives who are so entrenched in the industry, who have access to so much data, get it wrong ?

Let me take a detour here. The argument that Amazon is an ecommerce company/content company and they want as many people to use their other services falls flat when you consider that phone is sold as a separate product - not a free offering - in a competitive market. When a consumer walks into a phone shop to purchase a phone - he looks at Fire phone , it's price (and may be it's features) and compares it with iPhone or S5. The fact that it is sold as a product in the open market, where alternate is another product, it should distinguish itself as a product first before it can entice on content offerings. In other words, if you want to increase your content consumption by offering a device to do it, offer the device as a free offering along with your services. However I know that Kindle eReader drove lot of eBook business for Amazon - but the key to note here is that Amazon was a monopoly on 1) books 2) eBooks 3)eBook reader - in fact first mover. In fact eBook reader was the best medium to access eBooks. And nothing applies now - not a monopoly on content, phone is not the best medium to shop on Amazon and not a first mover or monopoly on either the device or the content. With all that said, phone is going to be compared to other 'phones'.

Getting back, how did the execs get it wrong ? Hubris ( Kindle Fire was a decent Android tablet in a space that lacked strong product, and captured good % of Android tablet market share) ? What happened to market research ? What happened to data based decision making - what data was there to support the whole project, the go-to market strategy including pricing ?

I believe we know the causes for failure

* high competition, commoditization of phones where margins are thin

* too late to market

* hard to differentiate

But there was a way this could still have been salvaged - price point. A day before iPhone 6 was announced Fire Phone reduced prices to $0.99, before that it was priced competitively with S5, iPhone. That initial price point (forget $100 back to as a Prime membership, which I will get a minute later) was a HUGE blunder. I can't count how many companies get pricing so terribly wrong.

Prime membership was interesting - it meant two things:

1. The target consumer for this phone is a consumer who has already bought into the benefits of Prime

2. You are trying to sell both the benefits of phone and Prime membership in one complex deal with an offering of a Phone. For just a phone buyer, this is forcing a year of Prime.

You can see how complicated #2 sounds even while just reading it. If #1 is true, Amazon should have just offered all existing Prime members a free phone. It sounds crazy, but

1. It would have made it exclusive to the "Prime" cult, which would have made it (both phone and Prime club) more attractive.

2. Much better offer than offering at $200+1 year Prime and then cutting to $0+ 1 year Prime.

#2 means two things:

1. That alone would be a HUGE signal of how poor the sales have been creating a negative impression, hurting the sales even more.

2. Amazon is offering $100 in value to acquire a phone+Prime user. That's a huge bet which only works if phone buyer finds Prime very attractive and spends gazillion $ on Prime. However, I think, a 'phone' buyer wouldn't remain a Prime user after the grace period. In otherwords a loyal Prime customer would have made more of the phone and a phone customer would make of Prime.

Final thoughts on ecosystem:

You don't offer multiple products and services at once and entice an user to become/convert to become a loyal 'ecosystem' user. You sell him on ONE product/service first - you deliver so much value that he trusts you, and buys into you. You then offer other 'related' products & services, and keep on binding him tightly to your ecosystem that he can't escape.

Apple started with iPod. Then came iTunes. Then iPhone. And you have a customer for life.

Microsoft started with Windows. Then came MS Office. Then you have the user tied to your ecosystem.

Amazon wants to tie Prime ( a collection of disparate offerings such as free 2 day shipping, limited online audio/video collection) to a communication device such as a Phone. (The Kindle Fire tablet was atleast OK - one shops more on tablet, one watches lot of videos on tablets). See how odd that sounds ?

I know strategy is hindsight is 20-20. I know Amazon plays for the long haul - so hoping to benefit from this initiative after 5-7 years.

It would be interesting to see what they do with this and how they come out of this. I have been proven right too many times , but also wrong few times - but that hasn't stopped me from speculating.

Let me boldly predict that Amazon is going to stop selling Fire phone before one year. Or they will start selling a phablet (following footsteps of Apple) and integrate eInk displays such as Yota.

Watched this video after I wrote the above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_0dVHMpJlo

Interesting video about monopoly and competition.

Related book chapters:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ujtrbcltiy6hgpy/ZtOChapters3-5.pdf?dl=0

Free food =/= culture

One of my favorite random questions to ask interviewers is to ask them about culture. I ask this same question to all interviewers and the answers I get are surprising. Many times they don't match !

That aside, 'free food' , good work-life balance etc is not culture. Those are all perks and benefits. Culture is 'how' you work and what values you carry. Sometimes it touches upon 'why' you do what you do as well, most most of the time, the culture should answer 'how' you work.

There can be many answers to how - collaborative, fun, fast paced, aggressive, laid back, stressed, bottom up/top down, bureaucratic, and so on. I know some of the above can't be said - what can't be said is usually the answer too. For example if you are not able to say explicitly that your culture is relaxed, it is definitely not relaxed but towards stressed.

I remember in one of the session from DuPont, all the HR talked about was 'safety' as a culture. Safety has nothing to do with what DuPont explicitly builds, but everything to do with how employees work in DuPont.

When I hear 'free food' as culture, I just wonder what's beyond the curve.

#culture

Infinite curiosity

I believe I read somewhere else that a quality to be a great PM (or an employee I forget) is to be infinitely curious.

The post I read today repeats the same criterion for a PM. It's not your 'technical' skills, but your technical aptitude or in other words, curiosity.

http://blog.ellenchisa.com/2014/10/04/need-technical-pm/

I read somewhere else that a great quality of a good manager is 'predictability'.

On optimism

Today's reading included this gem - project management lessons learned from NASA.

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oce/llis/imported_content/lesson_1956.html

Lot of stuff there is relevant even in today's age in any project management, especially in software project management that I can relate to.

There were several points that triggered my thoughts, but I will tackle one today : that's

engineers are born optimists

This , I guess is true in general. I was an engineer myself, and I learned a lot due to my peers during my engineering. They were all optimists - they never doubted that something can't be done. They were mostly self taught, and attempted all questions in quizzes and exams, despite there being options to answer a smaller subset of questions.

While working, our team of engineers were such a team - who said yes to every problem or task, often without understanding that accepting those tasks would make us lose sleeps and weekends.

By definition, engineer solves problems. Engineers build things and fix things. I studied MBA because I wanted to solve business problems. I am now a Product Manager, because I wanted to build and fix products/broken user experiences.

However in my product management career I have had to work with pessimistic engineers - who almost always said "no" or "it would be difficult" to many of the challenges I threw at them. Very rarely did I find engineers who were optimistic to say "yes, that can be done" attitude. In those cases, engineers were usually contract positions.

While reading Jobs' bio, I was jealous how he could push engg team to achieve impossible. If there is one trick I would like to learn, that would be to challenge and push engineers.

While I am often discouraged by the pessimist attitude of engineers, I am equally annoyed by the optimism of certain product managers. I have come across such inexperienced product managers who tend to throw in complex requirements that are never before implemented to a project that already has a short deadline and executive's attention. Perfect recipe for failure if there ever was one. " I believe engineering will all come together at the end... universe will make it happen, you know" was the constant mantra until I stepped in and de-scoped everything to get an MVP out.

The conclusion of this article is that if engineers are more flexible to try out, to experiment, to stretch the boundaries - they are a delight to work with for product managers. At the same time, product managers should be careful and very afraid about what all might go wrong. In addition, PMs should gauge engineering difficulty and time estimations well.

Engineers are better off erring on the side of optimism, while PMs should err on the side of pessimism.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Product Management and User Experience Thoughts