Protozoa and Product Management
I’m less than a full week into my tenure at First Round Capital and I’m already having more fun than I had hoped. One of the primary reasons I wanted to join First Round was because of the firm’s focus on companies at the earliest stages of their development. Already, I’ve seen a number of high-quality opportunities from enthusiastic entrepreneurs setting out to solve big problems. I couldn’t be more impressed with the people that I’ve met and the products they are setting out to build.
Just before starting with First Round, I began to read some of the work by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Coincidentally, there are parallels between his field of study and product management. The lessons are straightforward, but seeing them in book on evolutionary biology was unexpected!*
In no particular order, here are just a few of the basics:
- Parallel One. Life began with simple organism; products should start with a simple premise. As Dawkins writes, “Genes, then, cooperate in cartels to build bodies, and that is one of the important principles of embryology.” Similarly, product success begins with fundamental building blocks. Any product may involve coordinating multiple components to solve a complex problem. But the first release needs to focus on the most basic elements. Deliver measurable results against a single part of the problem then build out the cartel.
- Parallel Two. Nature abhors inefficiency; so do your users. In nature, if you are not efficient, you die. Maybe you starve or maybe you are killed by a predator, but the end result is the same. The same is true for product managers. Inefficiency will harm your product. I’ll wager that in the history of user feedback, no product manager has ever heard a user utter the words “Your battery life is too long” (yes, I’ve got iPhone 3G on the brain) or “Your product is too snappy.”
- Parallel Three. To survive, species adapt to their surroundings; great product managers listen to their users. In my experience, product managers tend to be very good at listening to user requests for more _______. A greater challenge is understanding what they don’t need. In this respect, there is a corollary to the need for efficiency. Each feature that’s not massively adding value to your core proposition is slowly killing you (hat tip Will Aldrich). If your users don’t use a feature (or stop using a feature) cut it - otherwise, it’s just a wisdom tooth extraction or appendectomy waiting to happen. Nobody wants that.
- Parallel Four. Chance is a major factor in evolution; it also a major contributor to the success of a product. In species, this chance may be as massive as catastrophic change in the environment or as molecular as a genetic mutation. Translating to product management it simply means: launch! By definition, if a product is never launched, chance can never help it to succeed. Don’t wait for it to be perfect, get it good enough and start creating opportunities for success. Launch! The worst case scenario is that you fail fast and cheap. In the best case, you survive and begin to evolve.
* In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nature is a bad-ass PM.
Filed under: business |
Tags: biology, product management, start-ups
Kent, you should also read The Age of Speed and Inside Steve’s Brain - two great books about product *development*. Solving the right problem fast with a simple solution is the key to a great product.
Personally I think product management is the wrong focus for a company. You should not *manage* products. Then you’ll end up where Yahoo! is today: slow, bloated and uninspiring. Yahoo! had all the opportunities to innovate back in 2002-2003 but got lazy and risk-averse. Much of this is due to the influx of *product managers* w/o any startup experience. They took on where others left off in the product cycle. Protecting the current P&L and the career path has it’s price I guess.
You should solve important problems via speed and simplicity. Ruthless prioritization and prototyping is key. And avoid focus groups, they only serve the purpose of justifying your plans. If the consumer had a say in Ford’s product development they would have asked for faster horses, not the creation of the car.
Dawkins book reminds me of Kevin Kelly’s old Out of Control from 1994. Might be worth a read. I’ll order Dawkins today for my July/Aug vacation!
All the best!
Per
Per - Hope you are doing well. Completely agree with on the Ford example, but I think that’s the essence of good product management. The art of it is to understand that when customers say “we want faster horses” what they really mean is “we want to get places faster.” You’ll love reading Dawkins. He’s a rhetorical genius. Enjoy! -Kent
Kent,
Great analogy…it’s amazing how much natural systems (ecosystems, physiology) and business mirror each other.
To your point on #3, it’s not just that you need to better lock into your surroundings, its that you need to adapt as they change. Example: light background, white moths win. Add pollution and soot and dark moths win. Understanding where external conditions make previous success factors turn into liabilities is a huge issue– its why constant testing is so important, even after you’ve gained traction.
Its also interesting in that biologically, attraction tends to be based on characteristics counter to survival (e.g., big rooster plume, bright colors, etc), highlighting that there is margin for error in that partner’s genes. Beware the signals of attraction today that leave you more vulnerable to predators tomorrow…
One of the best blog posts I’ve read in a long time Kent. Eloquently said — I couldn’t agree more with the lessons. And timely too given some decisions that I’ve been involved with recently. Your right, nature truly is badass PM.