Phase 1 of Product Management
Before early humans discovered wheel, its worth imagining moving about or moving things about. A journey which today takes minutes or hours used to take days and months. Discovery of wheel started with a problem or need to improve a situation, to live a better life, to improve the quality of life. Come to think of it every invention, every innovation, every improvement always has the most fundamental driver of elevating human life to a higher standard or very importantly to counter fear. Even though our focus is specifically around IT products, as we covered in ‘What is a Product Management’, the general principles are applicable to wider spectrum of products. And it all starts with a need, a problem and what can be done to address them.
Question is how do you identify a need? It starts with when we identify that the current way of doing something is sub optimal. It is sub optimal in the context of effort, time, cost, risk and convenience. Sometimes all of them can be factors, sometime one or combination of factors can be a key driver for a need. Arguably, risk can trump everything else for a need to exist. One of the products that I build was an online ‘checklist’ functionality for investment banking operation users. Checklist sure should be a common term used across industries, however, from an investment banking perspective checklist refers to set of activities users are meant to do on daily, weekly, monthly, annually for ensuring smooth running and compliance to rules. The first discussion that we had before we got down to actually building it was to understand from the users what was driving the ask. When we spoke to the users, we were informed that current process was cumbersome with checklist being maintained in spreadsheets, paper, isolated utility tools etc. Primary issue that was being highlighted was the lack of consistent controls which essentially means the process was risky. In some cases misplaced documents or lack of control to ensure timely completion of regulated processes had resulted in regulatory warnings. It was effort intensive as some of them were being maintained on paper which had to be filed and regularly maintained.
If we want to take a more general example, lets evaluate iphones which disrupted and introduced a new way of doing things. Before the advent of iphones, and I will take the liberty of ignoring some prototypes in between, humans would need a mobile to call and message and the other products to listen to music, check weather, play video games, read news etc etc. Two factors that I can pick up from pre iphone days which drove the need was cost and inconvenience of buying and maintaining many different products. Actually with iphones Steve Jobs famously quoted’ “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them“. I wont be surprised if before iphones anyone even remotely thought what a smart phone could do. But what is important to note is that when Steve Jobs and his team thought of iphone, the need for having such a product was at the heart of the discussion.
ProductSME 