If you hang around product managers or developers long enough you are bound to hear the old saw about “what” vs “how” in requirements. It actually forms a pretty good basis for division of responsibilities and teamwork. But sometimes people get bogged down in the esoteric argument and miss the fact that some answers are […]
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The formula: “design for the novice, configure for the pro”
Mark Suster has a line in his recent blog that I think perfectly captures the ideal design goal for software: “Design for the novice, configure for the pro” I think that with this simple statement he captures the direction we all need to be heading to produce successful software design. Particularly in enterprise software, we are always […]
Don’t rely on technical features to market your product
As part of marketing their Chrome browser, Google recently did some research into whether people actually understand what a browser even is. As you can see from the video, the answer was “no” for 92% of the people they interviewed in ‘man on the street’ interviews. Above: “Man on the street” interviews by Google about […]
Prioritizing features is the last thing you should do
Jeff Lash has a good post (Product Management is More Than Prioritizing Features) that focuses on probably one of the key deficiencies of poor product managers. I actually agree with most of his post, but don’t think he takes it quite far enough. He describes the trap of PMs who think that their job is […]
Customization leads to failure
What is the leading cause of product failure with startups? Well, I don’t have the quantitative research to prove it, but I would guess that somewhere near the top is over-customization to suit the needs of ‘important’ customers. You probably know the drill: Create vision and product plan Try to sell product Meet great prospect […]
Pick one thing (well, maybe 3)
Product managers have a great temptation to try to assemble a broad list of features for a release that maximally uses the resources, time or both. While this ‘kitchen sink strategizing’ might seem efficient on one level in that it gets as many things done as possible, it fails on two very important ones. Failure […]
System for Prioritization of Features
I know, everybody has some magic formula for setting up prioritizations in their product plans, MRDs, PRDs, Go-to-market plans etc. However, I have found most of them overly complex. This leads to more argument about what each tier really means than it is worth. Years ago at Remedy I learned a simple system that is […]