A surprisingly large number of technology companies don't have any formal product management. That is often because the founders or other principals are fulfilling the role.
We can help by taking a broad view of your product in its markets; help you understand whether there are market opportunities you are missing, or whether the product could be more competitive.
How technologies, like special effects and small children, should hide their light under a bushel.
On one of my regular visits to our customer Industrial Light and Magic in the early ‘90s I was talking to one of the matte painters I love to watch users (whether artists or technical whiz kids) as they work. You learn so much from them. Only that way do you get a real understanding for their pains and needs. Sandy was drawing around the blue stockings on an actor, frame by frame, with amazing care and precision. She explained that they were going to have to remove the lower legs so that it looked as if the actor had had them amputated. The first stage was to isolate them.
Now usually you can hope to draw one frame and then move forward several frames, draw another, and then have the software generate the in-between shapes. If the motion is relatively simple, they match, or nearly match, the image, leaving the artist to do some simple fine-tuning. This is called “in-betweening” and we had written that functionality into Matador for just this purpose. Sandy knew all about this as she had helped us specify the functionality, so I asked her why she was not using it. In answer, she zoomed out so that I could see that the actor was sitting on a swing, hung from a mast, on a boat rocking on the ocean, shot by a camera on another boat. Simple the motion was not. In fact it was so complex that no amount of clever in-betweening was going to help her. I shook my head in disbelief at the skill and dedication required even to consider attempting this shot, never mind to bring it off convincingly.
Fulfilling unmet needs is not enough
I know it is an act worthy of excommunication amongst the congregation of inventors, innovators and technology entrepreneurs to criticise Sir James Dyson. All those stories of success in the face of huge challenges, the amazing 5,126 prototypes that it took to develop the Dual Cyclone™ technology (vacuum cleaner) and “15 years of frustration”, makes criticism heresy.
The latest product to come from the legendarily inventive stable of James Dyson is the “Dyson Air Multiplier”™. This is a £200 ($300) desk fan.
The website shows people being amazed by the fact that air is coming from the device without any visible means of propulsion. It is clever, darned clever, reportedly taking “every discipline form Dyson’s 350-strong team of engineers and scientists to develop”; clever, but dumb.
Apparently by not having any blades (I bet it does – you just can’t see them) it prevents buffeting. Buffeting? Is buffeting a major cause of annoyance in the office environment? Is that seriously an unmet need? I know that I find buffeting unpleasant, but only when my Bloody Mary ends up in my lap at 30,000ft.
The importance of naming new concepts and product ideas
Four of us sat in the musty compartment as the train rattled southeast from London’s Victoria towards Canterbury. We were a strange mix of characters, brought together that morning because we were all part-time tutors at Canterbury College of Art.
I was supplementing my meagre postgraduate allowance by introducing architecture and graphic design students to these whacky machines called computers, which, in 1980 had yet to have any noticeable impact on their lives.
John Warwicker, who was teaching Graphic Design, was telling us about the band he belonged to and their plans for their first album. They had come up with the novel idea of not having a name at all, but simply a graphic symbol:
If Harvard MBAs have started taking an oath to ’serve the greater good’ isn’t it time that Product Managers jumped on the bandwagon?
Where do our ideas come from and can we really call them ours?
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