Here’s an obvious statement: the web (internet, computers, mobile, all of it) is changing. Here’s maybe a less obvious statement, but still nothing groundbreaking: the rules for how you build, maintain, and grow business on the web are also changing. This means that you need to adapt, to be prepared to change how you operate, and to be different from what you are today. What works today is almost certainly not going to work tomorrow.
If you plan on being a successful product person in the next few years, then in addition to thinking about what the product is, you are going to have to think about user experience, about business metrics, about marketing your product. In addition, you are going to have to do it while building products in an Agile fashion, so that you can fail fast, learn, adapt, and build the best business you can. I’m calling this change the Rule of PLUMB. PLUMB stands for Priorities, Lean, User experience, Marketing, and Business. Before I get into my thinking, let’s look at the past to see where we are headed (and why).
Product People Today:
There are two types of product people today, the pinballers and the visionaries.
Pinballers serve as a translator between development and executives; their job is to take directives from someone higher up, make sure that the product team follows them, and then communicate that progress back up the chain of command. Pinballers tend to be found in large companies, where there’s lots of middle management. They have a very tactical approach to their job.
Visionaries determine the direction and the priorities for the product; their job is to research and to be very far out in front of the team so that they can understand where the business needs to be. Visionaries tend to be found at startups and smaller companies. These are very strategic roles.
Pinballing tends to not work that well these days. With that setup, where you have management telling product people what to do, many details get lost in translation; the people making decisions are not talking with developers, are not talking with designers, and most important, are not talking with customers.
The right way to run a product organization is with visionary product owners, who can be strategic and assess the needs of the business from a product perspective. The best environment is one in which there is an open line of communication between developers and customers and product owners and executives. Everyone should be on the same page, and product owners should be leading the charge, with both qualitative and quantitative data to back up their plans.
Visionary product owners focus on creating a vision and then making parts of that vision a reality, so that they can test and validate it as they go. This is how you build great products today.
Product Owners of Tomorrow:
So where are product owners headed? What methods will be successful in the next few years? As much as product owners should strive to be visionaries today, if they want to continue to be successful in the future, they need to be able to think and act like user experience designers and general managers.
How can you make the best decisions about your product if you don’t understand how an interaction works or the business implications of your decisions (i.e. how will this affect SEO, how will this affect Average-Order-Value?).
This is where my idea of PLUMB comes in. Product owners need to expand their concern to include the following:
1. Priorities: Talk to customers, do research, determine what is the first priority, and focus on that.
2. Lean: Be Lean with how you attack priority number one. Get something to customers fast and then iterate, using Agile methods.
3. User experience: User experience is how people interact with your company. And UX is king — it becomes your brand.
4. Marketing: Understand how you will get the word out. You should know how to talk about your product or the changes that are made, or be able to respond to questions about it. How will you announce changes on your site, and how will you make bigger announcements? Work with marketing on issues like this so that everyone understands what’s in store.
5. Business: Understand the economics of your product; what sort of revenue are your bringing in, and how? What factors determine how much customers make use of it?
Focusing on the five aspects of PLUMB means that to some degree that product owners are taking on some responsibilities that are closer to those of a UX designer or general manager. I don’t necessarily think that the three distinct roles will all blend together in the future, but it does mean that all three will have to think much more about same things — the big picture. PLUMB is one way to help make that happen.
[Photo: Losevsky Pavel/Shutterstock]
