Why don't you just ...

“Why don’t you just do …?”

“You should just …”

If you have worked in product management for more than a few months someone has said this to you. It’s deeply frustrating and can feel condescending.

Product managers should embrace constraints

Force constraints on yourself as a way to change your thinking.

I ♥ grocery shopping and am always looking for ways to make things more efficient.

In our most recent release of ClipDish I wanted to add support for sending ingredients to a shopping list. The obvious solution is to add a grocery list feature into ClipDish.

Upon reflection, I realized that would take longer than I wanted with no clear return on the time investment.

Instead, I ended up integrating ClipDish with Apple Reminders. This cut the implementation time from weeks to hours. It also added some additional features like Siri and shared lists that I wouldn’t have even thought to include in the first version of a feature built from the ground up.

The value of product management

I’ve spoken with a lot of CEOs from engineering led organizations who don’t understand how a much a good product manager helps their bottom line.

Here’s what I tell them.

Great product management drives down the cost of development because it front loads mistakes where the cost of being wrong is low.

In other words, if you’re learning that you’ve built the wrong product after you’ve released, you just ran a $$$$$ experiment that I could have probably done for less than $1000 and some interviews conducted via UserTesting.com.