Successful Product Management. Lucky or Intentional?
Is your product successful because you were lucky, or because you were methodical and intentional?
Do you want to build a plan where you are dependent on good fortune, or do you want to make your own “luck?” Both approaches work, but only one makes sense as an intention. Slide 3 of your presentation to a venture capitalist should not say "And then we get lucky!"
Product Success Is Not Easy
Saeed Khan wrote a critique recently, in On Product Management, of an article by Phil Meyers on the Tuned In blog. Phil’s article is an analysis of the pending re-organization at Starbucks, and the one quote that Saeed keyed in on was:
At the end of the day, it’s simple. Create a product or service that your buyers want to buy and the rest takes care of itself.
Saeed’s point is that it is not that easy. A lot of hard work goes into creating a successful product. And Saeed's right.
Maybe Phil’s point is that the executive should not worry about the details, and trust in his team to do all the hard work. But he doesn’t really come out and say that, so we can’t really back him up on that front. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt anyway. There’s another point that Phil makes that is potentially disturbing:
Looking at metrics like average same day sales and products per square foot lead you down some strange paths. Schultz even admitted as much in a letter from the board about a year ago in which he worried about the company "losing its core"
Yes, abandoning your goals to pursue your metrics is bad. But don’t abandon your metrics to pursue your goals – unless all you want to do is get lucky.
You might argue that a company like Animoto got lucky when their product spread virally within Facebook and their user base jumped from 25,000 to 700,000 users. But if you listen to the interview that Amber MacArthur did with co-founder Brad Jefferson, you will realize that it was only when they tweaked their product offering - a response to empirical analysis of product adoption metrics - did their success explode. I would argue that they made their luck by being intentional.
Empirical Processes
When you can perfectly model your business analytically, you can then measure the inputs and know (with certainty) the outputs. I learned this as a college engineering student. Real world processes can never be perfectly modeled analytically. As a professional engineer I learned this, too. Real world processes are empirical. The secret to great engineering is to apply analytics to those empirical processes to create disruptive innovation, and combine it with empirical controls that help you statistically predict the likely outputs. The answer is simply that neither analytics nor empiricism alone can help you achieve greatness.
Business processes are also empirical in nature. Even when you can devise an analytical model for the behavior of an isolated system, you have to acknowledge that no real world system is isolated. You have to expect unexpected inputs into the system. As Saeed points out, you have to apply analyses to make smart decisions when developing your process (or business model, or product). And what Phil appears to discount is that you also need to apply empirical measurements to your process (or business or product) to control the expected results.
