I have stacks of books about creating successful products, many of which I’ve hardly opened; others, I have read cover to cover. I have read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm and Al Ries and Jack Trout’s The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing several times .Over the years, I have come to learn and respect how valuable these two publications were and are. The former, I regard as my Bible and the latter, my Ten Commandments, you could say, at least in terms of making successful products. I have found their timeless principles and assertions to be consistently reliable predictors of the future.
A building block of the 22 Immutable Laws was the Product Category. Ries and Trout clearly understood its significance in the marketplace. Adding to their work, and I say this with humility and respect for their mastery of the art, I will define the term Product Category as a foundation for explaining the principles that follow in this book.
I assume you already have fundamental tactical product management skills: interviewing customers, writing up marketing documents, providing visibility to management, presentation to other constituents, process management and so on. If not, there are plenty of books that can help you with them. This book is about two significant inflection points in the life of a product; inflection points as subtle as the change from autumn into winter – some days it is hard to tell which exact season you might be in – but the long-term trend is there. Plant in the spring, grow in the summer, and harvest in the fall.
You can’t get wet from the word water
- Alan Watts
No book will compensate for the lack of experience in shipping a product. Just as a tour guide to
This book is a guide to the city of
Like many people, I have always been curious about how things really work, and so, the journey of the past fifteen years has also been one of searching for the core principles behind what makes a product succeed, and perhaps more importantly, what makes a product fail. I have distilled this journey down to a few principles spelled out in this book. They will help you understand where you are in your journey across Productville, how you got there, and if you are lost, offer guidance on how to get on track again.
I write this book assuming you already know the product you want to ship, and that you know how to market your product, and that you have a capable production team in place to build the product. You may be working on a late version of your product, but struggling to remain competitive and profitable. You may be wondering how your competitors have gained so much ground when only a few short years ago, your product was the leading solution. Or perhaps you see your product as a late arrival with a real chance to challenge the leading product in your Product Category - by solving the same customer problem in a novel and exciting way – and taking ownership of the Product Category.
Who is the real enemy?
To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.
- Sun Tzu
A competitor has never defeated me. I was usually able to screw it up all by myself.
A company’s real enemies are not so much their competitors, but rather themselves. The battle is won or lost within the very walls of the corporation, without the help of outside competition. The opportunity is there - the customers wait with purchase orders in hand – all you have to do is execute. If you think you can somehow focus on bringing value to your customers and fight off all the internal corporate distractions, politics and other conflicting interests, success will surely follow. Even when a capable Product Manager has a good feel for how to steer his product towards success, he is often steamrolled by well-meaning peers and superiors. It is often because he has not made a case for the trade-offs required to ship a successful product.
A paper tiger always beats a real tiger
- Chinese proverb
No matter how good something is, a superior one can always be designed on paper. Let us say you and I were to design a car to compete with the highly successful 2007 Toyota Camry. Our new design would provide more space, better performance, and offer 75 mpg in city. It took us only a few days to come up with the blueprints to impress management. We are brilliant! How can we lose!
It doesn’t take a genius to guess that the product management team responsible for delivering the 2007 Toyota Camry has done a superlative job; they made the best possible trade-offs required to dominate their Product Category. If they had pushed hard to get 75 mpg, they would have over invested in fuel consumption research, or made the car too light or small to remain competitive in that Product Category or any number of other problems would have emerged. In addition to the almost perfect trade-offs they did make, they took a long-term product management view, improving the car just enough with each new model. Obvious stuff, you might say, but few companies manage to keep a product in such good balance. This book will help you keep your product in the right balance.
The paper tiger proverb underscores the problem that great new ideas will in theory result in roaring success: “This feature will wipe out the competition,” or “We just have to add this gizmo feature to dominate the market,” or “Let’s make the product bulletproof!”
Twelve years ago, an investor who was considering investing in one of my start-ups told me of a rule-of-thumb he used to evaluate investment candidates: “Liam, your product needs to be about seven times as good as it is now.” He was right. My brainchild was not nearly as good as I thought it was at that time. Funny how when someone tells you something like that, it suddenly appears so obvious. You just needed someone else to point it out.
In most companies that make products, a Product Manager faces countless great ideas about where to take the product. Some colleagues have spoken to customers directly and they have collected grocery lists of features to add to the product. Others have years of high quality manufacturing experience and want to build a bulletproof product. Added to that pressure, the Product Manager’s boss may also have strong feelings about where the product should go. Where the product must be taken to satisfy long term strategic needs is an important consideration, but sometimes suggestions are driven by a boss’s excitement about their or someone else’s brilliant idea, not by critical product management considerations. Everyone is well meaning, and many arguments presented to the Product Manager are sound. Experienced Product Managers understand, however, that ideas are ten-a-penny, and that turning an idea into a successful product is where the art of the craft lies. Thus, a major part of a Product Manager’s job is to set realistic expectations about what a feature might really cost the company, and what the value of the feature might actually be; the cost is almost always a lot more expensive that it appears at first, and the value is usually a lot less.
When you present a clear, defensible, consistent product decision process to your constituents - your team, your boss and your peers – they are less likely to try to drive the product decision process themselves. The important ingredient here is the product decision process: a set of principles by which you make trade-offs during the block-and-tackle work of true product management.
Imagine you had successfully crossed a minefield to reach an orchard on the other side. From the fruits you harvested, you fed your loved ones for years. Somehow, you worked out where not to step on your way across that minefield and perhaps you even have a few scars to show for it. You might want to share your knowledge with others.
Bringing a product to market can be an extraordinarily satisfying experience. It can also be like crossing a minefield. Mistakes tend to be expensive; some of them are career limiting, some significantly reduce a company’s chance of survival and others might be just plain old painful for everyone involved.
I want to share what I have learned so that others might apply these principles profitably.
I intended originally for this book to be an exercise in gathering my thoughts after moving on from my third real start-up to my fourth, but it quickly evolved into something that looked more like a book. So here it is. I do not plan to spend the next two years scrubbing it, or spend any time trying to make the book look bigger and deeper than it is. I have left out all the “…and I’ll like to thank my mother, and my uncle Cornelius for being there when I cried all night” section. In addition, there is no section listing the thousands of hours of research subjects, companies and bibliographies either. Frankly, I can scarcely remember where I learned most of what I learned. I was busy.
Many books end up unread, or half-read, in sitting rooms and on coffee tables across the land. I have a house full of them. This book quickly grew to 400 pages, and so I stripped all the fat out of it. Any Product Manager I have ever met was too busy to get through a 400-page book. If you MUST read only part of this book, then skip straight to Chapter 5 on page 67. If you read that one chapter and nothing else, then my job has been worthwhile. If you do not get something out of Chapter 5, put the book back on the shelf, or in the trash.
I encourage you to take a shot at the questions at the end of each chapter, even if you do not buy this book. If you are reading this book in a library or in a bookshop and you do not want to soil the merchandise as my local grocer puts it, write the answers down on a piece of paper.
I begin with a discussion about what Product Category means. I do that because I now believe an understanding of what a Product Category means is critical to the Product Manager’s job. It is as critical to the job of product management as having a map of the battlefield is to a general who is about to put upon his enemy. For years, I have listened to people bandying about terms like Product Category, “the product market,” segment, niche, sometimes interchangeably in the same conversation. Niche is a quaint little town in
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