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.
If Harvard MBAs have started taking an oath to ‘serve the greater good’ isn’t it time that Product Managers jumped on the bandwagon?
On June the 3rd 400 students graduating from Harvard Business School took an oath to “serve the greater good”, “act with the utmost integrity” and guard against “decisions and behaviour that advance my own narrow ambitions, but harm the enterprise and the societies it serves.” It is not exactly a Hippocratic Oath, which was sworn to Apollo and starts with a promise to share your goods with your teacher and his children, but an oath nonetheless.
Where do our ideas come from and can we really call them ours?
The latest post on Carl Knibbs’s blog is a great practical guide to generating product ideas. This got me thinking about the nature of ideas and invention. People tell me that I am creative, that I surprise them with ideas, that I say funny and unexpected things. I’m an inventor and have a patent to prove it. Despite this I rarely feel like I am the source of an idea.
So where do ideas come from? My personal experience is that they come almost entirely from outside; from books that I read, people I talk to, things that I see. Sometimes an idea comes immediately, sometimes much later. For example, I am currently reading Bill Buxton’s excellent Sketching User Experiences and I’m really struggling to get through it because it keeps prompting all sorts of interesting ideas that set my mind off in different directions.
Why we should set our users free.
Browsing my bookshelves this afternoon I came across “Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation” written by Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver and published in 1972. From the back cover:
“Adhocism is the art of living and doing things ad hoc – tackling problems at once, using the materials at hand, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or “proper” approach. As a principal of design it begins with everyday improvisations, such as bottles for candle holders and tractor seats on wheels for dining chairs.”
It was a remnant of the 60s, a “just-do-it-man!” philosophy that went alongside The Whole Earth Catalogue: “an encyclopaedia of alternative ways of living and suppliers of the means of doing so” (hey, don’t knock it: apparently Steve Jobs has described the Catalogue as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web).
Or when “no” can be the right answer and lead to innovative features
Building competitive edge into your products is more complex than ‘more is better’.
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