Showing posts tagged products
Phil Libin Keynote - Focus on Product & Design
Great Keynote presentation by Evernote’s CEO, Phil Libin touching on why he believes today is the best time to start a company (if you’re starting one for the right reasons). Reasons being…
- App stores
- Open source infrastructure
- Freemium economics
- Social media
He says to “focus on design and build the best product.” This wouldn’t have cut it five years ago but it does today. Advisors used to tell him that “the best product doesn’t always win” and although that used to be true, it’s not anymore, especially in the consumer internet space.
I also really liked a quote he provided from HBS professor Howard Stevenson explaining what he thinks entrepreneurship is:
“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Phils interpretation is that if you have a vision or something that you really think the world needs then you pursue it without worrying about how you’re going to get there with what you have right now.
"‘Managing the product’ means deciding what we do to the product and then making it happen.
When you unpack that, it involves strategy (what is important to do?), resources (how much time can we spend on it?), managing development (what do we need to build in order to do it?), managing experience (how will it look and work, how does it integrate into what we already have?). And all of it with regard to the bottom line of the business. Given a strategy, resources we have, a user experience bar to uphold — given all that, what can we do and why is it worth doing?
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I try to lead every decision with user experience. What is the user-facing situation we want to change? Or if the motivation isn’t because of a user benefit, but a pure business reason — what is the impact on the user, and how can we align incentives so this at minimum makes sense to the user? This is critical.
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Once the process is started, and programmers are implementing, we don’t bite off too much at once. We want to design one thing, implement it, and then see it in action. The design -> program -> review cycle is critical and it works best when it is a small and tight cycle.
Throughout the design -> program -> review cycle, it’s important to focus on flows not individual screens.
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One of the best words you can internalize is “satisfice“ — in other words, “done enough” given a certain goal. There is no absolute measure of “done.” It’s up to you to decide, because all projects can go on forever. The best way to determine when you are done is to again lead with design, where the function of design is to reach a solution to a problem. When the problem is no longer a big enough problem to matter, you are done.
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— Awesome post by Ryan Singer of 37Signals
I strongly recommend reading this book. INSPIRED: HOW TO CREATE PRODUCTS CUSTOMERS LOVE by Marty Cagan
http://www.svpg.com/recruiting-product-managers/
This is a fantastic description for web product managers. Depending on who I’m talking to, I often have a difficult time explaining exactly what I do all day/everyday. This post does a fantastic job explaining why that is; product managers encompass many skills and abilities empowering them to work on many aspects of a product and requiring them to interface with different groups in an organization.
I’ve always enjoyed product management for the sole fact that it cannot be taught and/or learned in school. I would encourage anyone with good judgment who enjoys working hard to explore a career in product management. Marty Cagan goes a bit further…
- A passion for products is essential
- Customer centric
- Must be a
geniusintelligent - Working hard - ” But there are many people that want to be able to work 40 hours a week and most importantly, leave their work problems at the office when they leave at the end of the day. This unfortunately is not the life of a successful product manager.”
- Integrity - “…he must work by influencing those on his team. This persuasion is done by mutual trust and respect.”
- Able to Present and Communicate effectively
- Takes full responsibility for all things product related - “…sees himself as the CEO of the product.”
- Able to apply technology
Cagan on hiring talented product managers… “After reading this list of traits and skills, you may be thinking that such people are extremely rare. They are rare - about as rare as good products are… Many companies think that all you need is someone from the marketing organization or someone with an MBA. In the old-school definition of product manager, this may have been true, but this is a recipe for failure today…My favorite source for product managers is to look for people with the characteristics described above and then use training, an informal mentoring program, and/or a formal employee development program to develop these people into strong product managers.”
Funny how it worked out for me…
![Evan Williams [Twitter co-founder] quote from StartupQuote.com](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_laxe6rvP4K1qaqjuqo1_500.png)
Evan Williams [Twitter co-founder] quote from StartupQuote.com
