What I learnt being a product guy (even before knowing I’m a product guy)
I’m quite obsessed by products. Everywhere I look, I only see products, not just things. No, I’m not writing with a laptop on a blogging platform. It’s a MacBook on Medium and this is for a reason.
I can’t point a moment in time when I started to look at a coffee mug and wonder why it is built in a way and not in another way… Or at people and make connections between how they look, what sunglasses are they wearing and why are driving a Prius not a BMW.
For few years I had a small shop selling cool stuff like freeride skis, baggy winter outfits, snowboards, kites and some other uber hype things for adrenaline junkies.
I love this culture, I’m part of it. I’m a freeride skier myself. I have eight pairs of skis but I never had an Omega.
You may think there is no connection between a pair of Faction twin-tip fat skis and a fancy Omega watch. But there is.
Both are aspirational products, filing the emptiness of not being so extraordinary in life as we’d like to be. Both interact with the same serotonin trigger in our cortex, making us feel, even a bit, like Candide Thorvex or George Clooney themselves.
But, at the end of the day, both of them are doing their job: you won’t feel miserably anymore. You will be a better skier and a charming man. And you know what? — you really will be.
I’ve been working in tech for a lifetime. I started by building computers in the kitchen in the early nineties. They were products, not Products. When the market sunk, we gone broke. But I learnt something: there is no Product without giving to customers a special and unique benefit. Without finding your secret souse and differentiate yourself from the competition. On a market full of mini-tower Pentium computers, we didn’t find a way to tell people that our mini-tower Pentium computers were somehow special. And we gone broke.
So, I learnt that a product becomes That Product when you really understand what it is about. And you make it relevant for somebody. And somebody asks for it. This is the Product Market Fit (PMF).
PMF happens when the the ideation and creation process meets the market. When your product faces customers and gets traction. This is the moment when you have a Product.
As I said, I’ve been working in tech for a lifetime. I built computers decades ago, websites in the .com bubble era, online shops, enterprise products. In the last three years I was so lucky to lead the product development process of Woogie, an educational voice assistant for children.
Believe it or not, your only competition is “nobody gives a shit”
A good Product Manager knows how to deal with “nobody gives a shit”. A good Product Manager can discover, test, learn and find a way to define a features set that makes sense for somebody.
Being a product guy is not about fancy programs or methodologies, it’s only about common sense. It’s about you. To care more about the people around you, your customers and early adopters, than your ego.
Creating products is, more than anything, about “I” and “You”. As long as you think in terms of “I”, you won’t be a Product Manager, you won’t have a Product. You’ll be just a guy that manages something. Eventually a mere product.
In the last 10–15 years, the whole startup hype and the need to launch products faster and faster, brought us the Agile development methodologies.
Started as a way to simplify the complicated and bureaucratic corporate methodologies, Agile failed to be, so often, just another process, with procedures, documents and more paperwork than before.
Everybody knows, the best interface is no interface.
Same way, the best process is no process.
I found that asking a product guy to be too conform, to obey the rules, to fill in all the retros and sink himself in mountains of user stories means to kill all the innovation and creativity. But, same time, the need to document all the steps comes from inside, not from a process. Because the discipline is better than any process.
Product management is a mindset
It’s not about methodologies, tools, boards and canvases, it’s only about you and what you are already doing (even you didn’t know it’s name is Product Management) — understand the market, care about people (even they aren’t your customers yet), learn-fail-experiment as often as you can and really love what you are doing: building something that people love and make them feel special. As George Clooney, if they like to.
