Better Product Managers, and Product Management

What’s your technology zeitgeist?

Sure, you’ve put together short-term and long-term product roadmaps, you’ve done SWOT analyses against your competitors, and win/loss analyses on sales efforts.  But there’s another major factor affecting your product’s chances at adoption and eventual success: the current technology zeitgeist.

By this I mean: the collective effect of people’s attitudes towards technology, usage patterns, access, expectations, past problems, what they’re reading in the mainstream news and hearing from their techier friends, what is socially acceptable.  All of these are constantly evolving, and it doesn’t take long for a tipping point to occur where a strongly-held belief from six months ago is now no longer relevant.

How is this critical to product management?  A good percentage of our requirements are actually assumptions.  We assume that, without feature X or rule Y, our product cannot be viable.  We assume that adoption policy Z will repel customers and prevent adoption.

A small example: Nine years ago, my products had a requirement to be fully compatible with Netscape 4. At the time, it was a correct assumption that eliminating support for that browser would make our products unusable by a significant percentage of Fortune 500 corporations whose IT departments had standardized on that browser. 

A bigger example: Eighteen months ago, one of my current company’s social applications was designed to mask individual usernames.  At the time, it was a correct assumption that the average consumer would consider it a massive privacy violation to have their name appear next to articles they’ve read.

Today, both examples border on the ridiculous.  But when you’re in the middle of managing a product, it’s easy to forget to re-assess these assumptions.  Even if you’re in an agile environment where there are releases monthly or semi-monthly, it’s easy to continue working under the rules of an outdated technology zeitgeist.

Make it a rule – mark it on your calendar – to re-assess the landscape quarterly.

That’s right – even three short months is enough time for certain elements to reach a tipping point.  (Personal example: within the 3 months after the iPhone release, I’d estimate that the percentage of my friends with mobile web access went from 20% to 90%+.)

How to Do a Technology Zeitgeist Assessment

Each product manager will have their own sense for how important individual elements are to their product’s adoption.  But these are general guidelines that (to some degree or other) affect pretty much all products.

Ask two questions: Has this changed? and Is this gradually changing? in the following areas:

• Concerns about personal privacy / What’s acceptable to share publicly?
• Expectations around how companies protect data privacy
• Technology access: broadband, CPU power, hours/day with Internet connection
• Comfort levels with using your type of product (novice to expert ratio)
• Where people are finding out about your product
• What factors influence the decision to use/not use your product
• What are consumers willing to sacrifice for convenience
• How fast/dynamic/personalized do consumers expect products to be?
• What technologies are supported by the lowest common denominator of computer/browser/Internet connection?
• Expectations around visual design (what’s “professional”/”fun”, etc.)
• Age of your average consumer
• Location and frequency that your average consumer uses your product

I’m sure there are more out there!  Please add your “technology zeitgeist” elements in the comments.

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