My series of 100 things I’ve learned about product management
Recently Unilever challenged Procter & Gamble to prove their advertising claim that P&G’s Fairy brand of washing-up liquid lasted twice as long as Unilever’s Persil brand. The result that followed provides a great lesson for deciding which battles to pick.
This is not the Field of Dreams and you’re not Kevin Costner. If you build it, the users will not come – unless they have a strong motivation to do so.
I’ve just kicked off another project through my firm, Product People Limited. With the inevitable flurry of project start-up activity, a couple of basic tasks have reminded me how important it is for product managers to be as flexible as possible, whenever possible.
Business networking used to hold about as much appeal for me as speed-dating with alligators. It was only later that I came to tolerate it, even enjoy it, but only after I learned to think about it differently. If the prospect of a room of people at an event fills you with dread, read on, this may help.
Like doing the washing-up, vacuuming under the sofa or cleaning your windows, housekeeping tasks with your product can get neglected because they’re tedious, not as interesting as new features and so on. However, if you’ve ever found yourself eating breakfast cereal out of an oven tray with a serving spoon because every single item of cutlery and crockery is festering in a pile in your sink, it should be apparent there is inherent value in tackling housekeeping tasks bit by bit over time.
You know how sometimes you read an email that incenses you so much that you have to craft a long, occasionally sarcastic, cutting BUT ENTIRELY JUSTIFIED reply explaining precisely why you think that person is a complete and utter d**k. Hmmm? Here’s why it may not be a great idea to send it.
I always used to think that I needed to have that one BIG IDEA to change the world before starting my own company. Turns out I couldn’t be further from the truth.
At some point in your product career, you’re going to piss someone off. It will be unavoidable. Hopefully it will not have been the result of, say, supergluing a pound coin to the desktop of your alpha sales guy. It might be a customer who’s annoyed with you, perhaps because of an otherwise well-intentioned change to your product. Is this a problem? Not yet. Let me explain why.
By failing to grasp the demographics of their customer base, Demon Internet appears to have scored a convincing customer service own-goal with their email upgrade.
One of the easiest traps for a product manager to fall into is unquestioning routine or habit. I learned about this most through my time at university training to fly with the Royal Air Force. Let me explain how it applies.