Weeknotes 362
What I did this week:
Product strategy for growth
In the product lifecycle model, a product goes from introduction to growth and then onto maturity before decline and retirement. I think the threshold between introduction and growth is where product market fit sits, and moving into the growth phase requires a different strategy than for the introduction phase. The same strategy doesn’t work at both stages.
In Ansoff’s matrix, the most likely move is to market penetration which is about increasing market share, but for the product I’m working on it’s more of a market development challenge. It’s interesting to think about what that looks like for a charity product that is, in part, a means to increase the market size but not necessarily compete in the market. If another product from another organisation achieves the goal, then that’s fine.
Product development process
I did some work on when you’d want to know what about a new product. Nothing ground breaking, just stuff like what market the product is in, how the business model might work, etc. I’m interested in figuring out at what points in the product development process different things become the riskiest assumptions. So, when is knowing if you’ll be able to acquire users an assumption you’d want to validate? When does knowing how you’ll differentiate yourself in the market matter most? Rather than guessing at what the riskiest assumptions are, it might be useful to have some guidance.
What I read:
The Goal
A management-oriented novel by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, describing a case study in operations management, focusing on the theory of constraints, and bottlenecks and how to alleviate them. And Time Magazine’s one of “the 25 most influential business management books”.
It’s pretty good, although not as well told as other business fables. But the ideas it expresses are mind-blowing. It talks about how value flows through an organisation and how local optimisation gets in the way of global optimisation. Once you get the idea, you see it everywhere.
Governance as a service
A reading list of governance related things.
What I thought about:
Creating a drumbeat
Slightly following on from my thinking about music metaphors for teams and work I’ve been thinking about the role of regular meetings for teams.
Lots of frameworks and anecdotal thinking about team effectiveness make use of regular meetings. And there’s lots of talk about how those meetings should be run, but I’ve been wondering if actually it’s the regularity that gives them their power.
Regular meetings create a drumbeat to guide the work, a predictable rhythm that takes people along, an expectation of progress. They align people in a subtle way, not around what work is done or how, but about when.
Comparing known and unknown
If, as a product manager, you want to develop a product or feature, but the technology available means it isn’t possible, how do you tackle that feasibility question? I guess there are two approaches. You can redesign the product to what the tech can do or improve the tech.
Redesigning/respec-ing the product is probably going to reduce it’s effectiveness but means it can be launched sooner. Improving the technology so it’s what the product needs means a longer wait to launch and probably a higher cost. This is a choice between a unknown and known. That’s a hard choice to make.