Re: The Product Management Manifesto

Joe Donnelly — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 10:38:34 -0000

Adam, I thoroughly agree with the material in your manifesto, but would organize it differently, for conciseness and clarity. My steps would be:

1. Know our target customer and her problems
2. Create a vision: our target customer using our solution
3. Decide if this constitutes a viable business
4. Deliver on the vision
5. Do it all again, from step 1

Along with the general principles that:
- We document everything unambiguously and concisely
- We continuously focus on high-quality communication between all parties
- We have good practice in place for dealing with the usual product mangement stuff (needs/requirements/use cases, lifecycle, pricing, marketing, sales channels and so on)

This may look a bit high-level, but this list can be broken down to lower levels of detail. To have additional items at the top level though inevitably brings the focus more onto what I have called step 4, "Deliver on the vision", which is already relativelty well understood, compared to creating the vision in the first place and aligning people behind it.

I believe that we as product mangers need to shift much of our attention to creating the vision, which means understanding our target market really well. This is too important to leave to others. Taking the vision as a "given" brings big trouble, whether it's a new product that misses the mark, or a mature product sufferring a death by well-intentioned-but-ultimately-valueless enhancements.

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Re: The Product Management Manifesto