Product management models of despair and awakening

 

How do you build a good product strategy?  A rather classic, default formula is described above. You analyze the competition, you study the market, talk to some experts and persona some customers. Then build and test and role out and pivot and all that tiresome stuff. This is horrible.

Why is it horrible? Because it is the same as a high school essay. You get a prompt, reflect on your life, maybe read a couple books for inspiration, and then cobble together an essay with 5 paragraphs. You probably start writing a terrible paragraph in the beginning, get more succinct as you go along, then rewrite the intro to align with everything else.  In the end you have a coherent product. The downside is that you wasted a lot of time reinventing the "why." 

There is nothing wrong with this approach. But is standard across the industry because for two reasons - it tends to work - and of equal importance, almost anyone can do it. Most universities are not training students to be product managers. It is a generalist discipline. They are trained in business, or computer science, marketing, social science, or humanities. They become product managers because they see an opportunity to supply their broad knowledge with a specific process. They have some level of authority within an organization. I would argue that most people who are product managers do it because they love the idea of the job, and they might also like the product, but probably not as much as the job itself. 

There are other ways to do this. One should indulge in divergent research.  While the image below is amorphous to interpret, it captures the same details as the standard product management model (above) though with a focus on materiality. This element is key. Products are not ideas. They are things. Digital software is a product. Products are intentionally crafted materials that function as a point of change for the user(s). An insurance policy can be a product, because the specific language of that policy was carefully crafted to determine how a person's life will function in relation to a catastrophic event. The distinction between 20 paid physical therapy sessions or 30 can have a major impact on the person's future. A piece of software is no different - if you must spend time searching for features, are uncertain when you need the tool, or ignore half of the software components - the product might not be well designed for you. 

The questions of product development go far beyond immediate usability. They are questions of market fit, acquisitions, and adaptation. How will demand for this product change over time, and who will have that demand? Under what conditions will the product be successful, and when will it not be successful. How much should it cost to build? How and where do people physically acquire it and at what price?

The answers are not easily distilled, nor should the answers be determined lightly. While a simple conversation might inspire a range of insights - everything should be treated as a hypothesis.  But the constant focus on documents fails to capture the material future of the product, and the only way to reconcile the gap, is to immerse oneself into the environments, the populations, and the materials wherein the prospective product will reside. 

So do the work. Immerse yourself. Make things physical. Quit waving your hands. Stop trying to talk to everyone and spend more time identifying the conversations that matter. Stop trying to be clever, and get personal, become a part of the problem you are hoping to solve. Do you have this problem in your life? Do you actively benefit from this product? If your answer is no, then you are probably the wrong person for the job, or you aren't doing your job right.

Product management that matters is a matter of ingress and egress. Like a good anthropologist, you need one foot in the world of the customer and one foot out. How do you know when you made it? Usually because you broke something "in the system" - you crossed a line of distinction, and are no longer an outsider in the eyes of the stakeholders. You are part of the problem. It is uncomfortable. You might be in jail. You might be injured. You might even just be bored, but now you it the line and it is time to pull back one step. 

Do not wave your hands and apply a generic formula for generic people to generic customers. Embrace the magic that flows through the world, dig into the the problem, become the world's greatest expert on the problem from all points of view, and let the solution realize itself through you. Let it awaken.

True Innovation Makes No Sense Yet Changes Everything

Over the decades I have spent countless hours with executives who seek to bring innovation to their IT systems or their businesses. They say they want dramatic changes. They are 110% convinced that certain technologies can make it possible.  But what they really want is to increase profits, increase efficiency, improve communications, and have greater control over their company.  Those are all good things and quite often, they want proven conventional methods to satisfy many of those needs. Innovation, however, consists of introducing an unknown variable into the mix, so that one cannot entirely predict the outcome. At first, no one likes that idea. 

In the photo above I am soaking pieces of an apple tree and a lemon in a sanitized bucket of distilled water. After a few days I will boil this water and add sugar. I will then filter out the items, cool it down, and bottle it with a chosen yeast to make a hard seltzer, approximately 4.5% ABV and 100 calories. Everything about this process is standard... except the infusion of apple wood and lemon.  I have only a vague idea what this might taste like, based on my experience of smoking meat with apple wood, the smell of the wood, and my familiarity with lemons. Perhaps this infusion won't work at all, it will make zero perceivable difference, or perhaps it will yield a disgusting result.  

To manage the risks, I am only creating one gallon of alcohol. Furthermore, everything I am doing is based on previous experiences and data, with the exception of the wood and fruit. If the outcome is terrible the cost was low. If it is only "a little" terrible, then I can try another version. Maybe apple wood and no lemon? Maybe pieces of oak under pressure - like this Cleveland-based company that uses a similar approach to age bourbon in merely one week?

The process I just described is not innovation. Soaking some wood in the water is somewhat novel, but thats about it. The overall process is more akin to the scientific method as a structured approach to incremental learning. This is one way, the most common way, to manage innovation. The innovation part is leveraging absurdity. Apple wood is a high risk, untested,  and by all means reckless ingredient that is likely to sabotage my brewed product. Have you ever seen an apple wood flavored beer on the shelf? Is this because it is a proven bad concept,  or did no one ever make the leap to try it, then try enough to succeed?  The only insight to hedge the risk, again, is my personal subjective experience with the wood which I used in a smoker, and that isn't very reliable. 

The risk to take a nonsensical action, and to persist in the nonsense, is at the heart of innovation, art, and insanity. The incredible opportunity is the small, yet viable probability that my reckless action will generate massive returns if all goes well. If it doesn't - well, then we could. have trouble. Creating a process to manage innovation is essential to keeping your company afloat by keeping the risks small.  But this still isn't innovation.

Yet what if, somehow, maybe this apple wood seltzer introduces a new idea about beverages. What if it surges in popularity, so much that it will generate an entirely new market of organic wood infused beverages, demanding an increase in new forestry growth and sustainable forestry practices. Maybe this demand will be high enough that it leads to new kinds of job creation,  and inspires other markets that enhance taking care of the earth. Just maybe, I soak some wood in a bucket, and with constant dedication and determination, transform the entire way beverage ingredients are sourced to stimulate new growth in the rain forests and stimulate new economic models.

This is all possible. Before Uber or Lyft, most people would never have jumped into a stranger's car. Before Starbucks, no one in their right mind would have spent seven dollars on a coffee. And before I started brewing beer in my basement, I never thought about the taste of a tree.

When irrational action meets profound vision to inspire a chain of consequences that forever change the lives of people, businesses, and communities – then you truly innovated.  If you are good at it, you don't need a 10 million dollar team of technicians to start, you just need a 5 gallon bucket and a few small logs.