What can a Product Manager Learn From Google Wave’s Exit?

Today, Google announced that it has killed Google Wave since they has not seen the user adoption they would have liked. There could be many reasons that the adoption didn’t pick up. I am sure that Google has done customer survey on this. But from an outsider and a product manager, I would speculate that its approach to design the Wave such as it includes everything for everyone is one of the top contributors to its fate.

Google Wave can be used as a messaging system, as a collaboration tool for work projects, as a way to share and comment on photos and videos, or as a wiki with shared data being editable by anyone who wants to contribute. This sounds cool until you realize that you have to let “everyone” know how to use “everything” that they may or may not need. This causes the challenges to the interface design and makes the Wave UI not to be particularly intuitive.

This is a lesson that we, as product mangers, can learn. When you try to have a product to do every possible use cases for every kind of customers you can think of, most likely you will end up a product that no one wants to use. It’s our job to figure out which persona we want to target and what exactly they want to use, or more accurately, what problem exactly they want to solve.

Back to Google Wave. If it realizes that, except for highly technical person, such as a software engineer, the persona who values real-time collaboration the most is probably different from the one who relies on wiki for the most of time. To make all these great things together, it just makes the whole thing confused and lets no one know what exactly it is.

Google probably has the luxury to do this experiment. But for most of us, particularly for those like me working in the enterprise side, we probably won’t get such a chance to roll out our product to the public, afford to test it for a year, and then kill it. So let’s learn the lesson from here and avoid make the same mistake which in our case will be very costly.

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A Product Manager for Just 3-Month?

I came across a job post that is looking for a product manager for a 3-month contract. I immediately had a question: what is the kind of product that only needs a product manager for just 3 months? There are several possibilities:

1. It is a product with a short life cycle, very short, like 1 month release cycle and 2 month shelf life. But does this product have road map beyond this single release? If there is no future, why does a customer want to buy it?
2. The team only looks for a product manager to a very limit number of activities during the product management cycle (Pragmatic Marketing has a good framework). But it will be difficult for a product manager to do the job without having time truly understanding customer problems and laying out the direction.
3. The recruiter probably doesn’t appreciate what a product manager could play in the success of the product. He/She may just want a product manager to come in, write requirements (magically), have a nice 200-page MRD/PRD, and leave it for engineering to carry through.

There could be other possiblities that I can’t think of. Will you hire a 3-month contractor for your product management team?

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What is the Product Management?

What is the product management? Particularly what is the product management of a software product? There is no clear definition. Wikipedia has a definition. But I don’t that it is as complete as it could.  Since the context is too broad, let’s focus it on software business in which I have spent almost all of my career.

When I asked other product managers what they do daily, I got variety of answers. Some of them worked like a UI designers and testers. Some of them did so-called outbound product marketing because the product is defined mainly by engineering teams. You can expect more answers than that. And if you talk to 10 product managers from different companies, you will probably get 10 different answers.

So what is a software product manager to me? I thought that I had an answer when I started this blog. But when I about to write it,  it appears to me that I don’t. But I do have several thoughts about it.

• A product manager is a broker, who can sense the demand – customer needs- and generate the supply – a idea converted to a product.
• A product manager is a puzzle solver, who needs to connect dots together, from an opportunity, an idea, all the way to the post-launch follow through. Not only that, a product manager should realize that those dots are not connected as a line. In fact, they are connected as a spiral circle. And you need to have a clear vision on where you want it to go.
• A product manager is a care taker, who will take every step to nurture the product, from a concept to a successful release. This means that a product manager will think it as a whole yet pay attention to the detail.
• A product manager is a master negotiator,  who must have a way to bring all the cross-functional teams together,  communicate and convince them, and make tough decisions for necessary trade-offs.

Let me try to summarize it in one sentence.  A product manager is a master who can carry a team of different players to convert an idea into a product into a growing marketplace to meet specific needs.

Let’s see whether I will be still satisfied with this definition in a year.

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