Better Product Managers, and Product Management

If you start recruiting via social networks and social media, talent will expect you to respond more rapidly. Different modes of communication have different expectations of “real-time” response.

If your initial business model assumptions were incorrect, you will need to adapt your execution plan. It may be possible to still succeed if you can provide a lesser version of the product/service but with lower costs, faster time-to-market, higher scalability.

If you collect people’s personal data, you will need to clearly communicate what you do with it and what will happen to it if your company doesn’t survive. If you suddenly close up shop with no warning, you’re going to have a lot of angry, alarmed ex-customers.

“If someone’s going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses.” – Getty CEO Jonathan Klein (Getty Images acquired iStockphoto, a crowdsourced low-cost stock photo provider).

If your code fails the “random person test”, then the only people who can point out flaws in your assumptions are other engineers. At a previous company, a lot of engineers complained about the effort involved in converting our entire codebase to Model-View-Controller.  They complained a lot less when they realized I and other product managers could see potential pitfalls when 10% of the code was written instead of 100% done.

If you change your environment, be prepared for your environment to change. “Professional” changes can move you away from the grubby-but-effective roots that got you to launch products and close deals.

If you want something done but there’s an obstacle blocking you, there’s usually a way around it. Funny story about looking beyond the obvious.

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