The essence of Product Management

I just came back from vacation, it was a glorious week by the sea. I had the most fun sailing Lasers, which are small-sized sailboats. On days when the wind got strong, the feeling of skimming the surface of the water, the sun and the wind on your face, it was superb.  I have a fascination with the wind, whether it’d be paragliding, kite surfing or sailing (3 sports at which I’m terrible). On my slow learning process last week, I hit a breakthrough when I realized that, for the boat to go fast, the sail had to be ‘happy’. If you can bear my very accurate nautical lingo, I think of a happy sail as one that is catching as much wind as it can, holding steady.

So, instead of looking at the water, or looking at the boat, you look up at the sail. What is its shape? Is it flapping? Are there creases? What are the streamers (little pieces of cloth) doing? Then you read those signs and you learn what the wind is doing, and adjust your trimming accordingly. When you do that, the boat sails faster.

This got me thinking that what we do as product managers is similar in some ways. We want our product to get traction and gain speed in the market place. The product is like the boat, and customers are like the wind. To tell what customers want is hard, especially if you can’t see them.. Traditional product management encourages you to get out of the office and visit your customers. That is more doable when you have a small number of customers giving you a good chunk of money each. But if you have thousands of customers giving you very little money, the ability to quantify what they want is hard.

Just because you can’t see your customers doesn’t mean that you can’t feel them. Just like the wind.

It’s a criticism that many product managers have heard from engineers: why don’t you go and find some formula that gives each piece of product feedback a weight and each customer revenue potential a value and you come up with an empirical way to steer the product?

I guess I could mount a weather station on my little Laser boat. But that is not the essence of sailing. I’m not crossing the Atlantic. I’m just trying to get my boat to cross the lagoon fast.

So instead of getting all analytical about it, I just try to feel the wind on the sail, and made small course corrections and small adjustments to the trim. And because the boat is moving, I see the results of my adjustments instantly. Every small input gets me some information. Every big input increases the chances that I capsize (a subject for another blog post).

For me, the essence of product management is to sense intuitively what your customers are doing to your product and to make small adjustments to it. Just like sailing a boat, you generally know where the wind is blowing from, and where you want to go, but in getting there you feel the wind on the sail, and make it ‘happy’, and adjust your settings as the wind moves.