Better Product Managers, and Product Management

This post is Part 1 in a series.

If you work for a tech startup, you know that the smartest thing to do is “fail fast” - devise a hypothesis, figure out the quickest way to validate it, and, when it doesn’t work out, scrap it and learn from it to move on to the next, improved hypothesis.

“If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.” – Reid Hoffman

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti

Everyone loves to talk about “fail fast”, but how do you do it?   Ideally, you started out with a specific metric or criteria to meet – but not everyone planned that well from the beginning (and some of us inherit others’ poorly-laid ‘plans’).  How do you recover and move on from there?

How do you know that what you’ve got now isn’t working and isn’t salvageable?  Here are 5 signs that it’s time to move on:

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Certain themes – something is better than nothing, you are not your user, always be asking questions, action drives more action – find their way into most things I write. At the king of that hill is “it’s all about execution”.

The blunter way of putting it is, no one cares about your great ideas. Because as long as they just sit there, good ideas aren’t any better than bad ideas or silly ideas or ridiculous ideas or insulting ideas.

Free Ideas. Just Add Execution. (Laserlike)

Share your ideas. Doing so will make you feel like you need to go do them, because of the small risk that someone will take your idea now that it’s “out there” and beat you to it. Sharing your idea will expose you to diverse feedback on it. Your idea will get pressure tested.

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