Improving product development
"The competitor has come up with the killer feature", "The customer wants this feature", "Apocalypse, if the launch does not happen by March 31st". Ah, our revered product managers, coming up with same old lines all the time. Most of these product managers are not worth the shining business cards they carry. Lets see:
1. Reactive: Show me one product manager who came up with true innovation. OK, that was harsh, but the point stands. Most of the time requirements document is a copy of competitors' features or rehashing the customer need. Granted these are important avenues to set the requirements but frankly this is no creativity. The genuine talent is in foreseeing the customer need and simplifying the features. Nevertheless, even on the reactive part of their job, most product manager's perform poorly. They either misunderstand or miscommunicate the customer requirements, causing long and never ending product cycles.
2. Poor planning: Product management is an art, I agree, but its an art with numbers. Manager has lots of tools and techniques to plan a project but they easily botch this process. How? Amazingly the product manager's are apt at make stupid engineering decisions. Yes, lots of them do have a background in engineering but after being away from hands on technology for 1o years, many of them are in the bastion of obsolescence. Answer, reinvent yourself product managers.
What is the remedy?
Get rid of product management, nope, the group has a role to play but lets redefine its role. Innovation generally flows out of R&D or marketing departments. We should introduce more marketing principles into product management. A not-so-radical idea would be to rotate product managers into marketing departments. The other dimension is engineering. Engineering should be given a bigger stake at the beginning of product design cycle. Technologists have a complete picture of intricacies and boundaries of the system. The integration and oft-missed problems like internationalization could be taken into account at the right time in planning. In short it is time to bring marketing and engineering near to each other, where product management has failed in past.
1. Reactive: Show me one product manager who came up with true innovation. OK, that was harsh, but the point stands. Most of the time requirements document is a copy of competitors' features or rehashing the customer need. Granted these are important avenues to set the requirements but frankly this is no creativity. The genuine talent is in foreseeing the customer need and simplifying the features. Nevertheless, even on the reactive part of their job, most product manager's perform poorly. They either misunderstand or miscommunicate the customer requirements, causing long and never ending product cycles.
2. Poor planning: Product management is an art, I agree, but its an art with numbers. Manager has lots of tools and techniques to plan a project but they easily botch this process. How? Amazingly the product manager's are apt at make stupid engineering decisions. Yes, lots of them do have a background in engineering but after being away from hands on technology for 1o years, many of them are in the bastion of obsolescence. Answer, reinvent yourself product managers.
What is the remedy?
Get rid of product management, nope, the group has a role to play but lets redefine its role. Innovation generally flows out of R&D or marketing departments. We should introduce more marketing principles into product management. A not-so-radical idea would be to rotate product managers into marketing departments. The other dimension is engineering. Engineering should be given a bigger stake at the beginning of product design cycle. Technologists have a complete picture of intricacies and boundaries of the system. The integration and oft-missed problems like internationalization could be taken into account at the right time in planning. In short it is time to bring marketing and engineering near to each other, where product management has failed in past.
posted by Learn By Mistakes at 12:57 AM
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