PRODUCTHEAD: “It was at that moment he knew …”

i am a product child #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Be comfortable not having all the answers; trust your team

Prioritise the customer when balancing B2C/B2B decisions

Counteract your cognitive bias towards adding complexity by subtracting

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hello

There is one kind of problem that I’m never worried about having: one with a straightforward fix, no dependencies, which simply requires a moderate investment of my own time and effort to resolve. Recently on a break I forgot crucial item at home. An otherwise unnecessary 4-hour round-trip later, problem solved. Number of people affected by the problem: 1.

In the grand scheme of things, there are far worse problems to have. I think one of the worst professional mistakes I made was back in the early noughties when I was a lowly technical presales consultant for a software scale-up called Zeus Technology. I and my partner in sales had been chatting with a larger-than-life character called Rodney who worked for one of the many federal agencies in the US. If we were successful with Rodney, we would have our foot in the door of an entirely new market sector for us. It meant a lot to a company of our size.

Over our many conversations, I had been working on a solution to their frequent power brown-outs. As their disaster recovery plan involved someone jumping in their car and physically transferring a hard drive to a secondary site, this routine got old rather quickly. My idea was to use the wonders of our company’s technology to detect an outage at the primary site and automatically bring up a warm standby system at the secondary. Old hat now in this post-cloud computing world, but at the time it was something akin to magic for Rodney.

Except it wasn’t going to work.

At least, not the way I’d designed it. While thinking it was going to be a fairly vanilla setup, I’d overlooked a fairly fundamental detail. Our software relied on the primary and secondary being on the same network. The two sites were on separate networks. Obvious in hindsight.

I was mortified — and was meant to be heading out to deploy a working system the following week. With my blood still running cold, I went to my CTO fully expecting to be packing up my desk shortly after. He sat me down, pointed out gently where and why I’d gone wrong, and then assigned one of the more senior team members to hoist me out of the hole I’d dug for myself.

Several late nights later, my esteemed colleague had worked a miracle. The end-result of what we were going to set up for Rodney remained the same, although the way of achieving it was now rather more complicated. Crucially his design actually worked, which was a dramatic improvement over mine. Rodney was elated.

There’s no particular moral to this story. I f**ked up, ‘fessed up and luckily had the kind of boss at the time who defaulted to supporting rather than firing. While I was solely responsible for causing the problem in the first place, making it good was beyond my abilities. I dread to think what would have happened if I’d not turned to my CTO for help and tried to ‘style it out’.

From the i-am-a-child department #

Apparently the French are less enamoured with OpenAI’s flagship product than other Europeans. Why? Phonetically ‘ChatGPT’ is ‘Cat! I farted’ in French. I’m going to smirk whenever I hear it from now on.

For you this week #

Jason Knight returns with another CPO Story on his podcast. This time he’s interviewing Treatwell CPO Maud Larpent.

Martin Eriksson also has a new article out reminding us that sometimes the solution to a problem is to take something away, rather than to add it.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

CPO Stories — Maud Larpent — Treatwell

Maud Larpent is the Chief Product Officer at Treatwell, the largest hair and beauty booking platform in Europe, which works with 75,000 salons across 15 countries. Maud started out working at Reuters, before moving into product leadership at TripAdvisor and Expedia and onwards to Treatwell.

Make sure everyone has the context they need

[Jason Knight / One Knight In Product]

Why less really is more: the strategic power of subtraction

We’ve all been there. Faced with a problem—underperforming product, slowing growth, lack of organisational clarity, clunky processes—what’s the default reaction? Add something. New feature. New initiative. New meeting. Another layer of management. Another slide in the deck.

But as a fascinating body of research shows, subtraction—removing, simplifying, streamlining—is not only underused, it’s often the more powerful solution.

Permission to kill zombies

[Martin Eriksson / The Decision Stack]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from otherwise unnecessary round-trips.