Product management is dead. Long live product management.

The role of a product manager in a startup has always been the one of the shaman. Normally you have one visionary (or worst, more) that explains his “vision”, and the shaman performs a ritual to enter the spirit world of good and bad features to tell the tribe what and how to execute.

It’s a very difficult job, the product manager is always the guy with more enemies in the company: just say no to someones idea, and you have a new one. And be prepared to the “you told me no 5 times already” argument, it will come up, and also to deal with internal politics very soon.

Having worked as a product manager myself, I felt the process and the idea as a whole was bad, all the experience of this world doesn’t give you a crystal ball.

The day product development died.

Eric Ries and “Lean Startups” represent for canonical product development wisdom what the meteor has been for dinosaurs. Nothing incredibly new, most of us used to do some (or most) of the things Eric devises since forever. For example, only an idiot wouldn’t measure the outcome of a new feature, or not gather all the feedback he can from customers.

What we never had was a common and shared framework to manage our work and dramatically reduce waste. What I hope will happen for product development is that it will be somewhat standardized in a set of practices that are recognized by the industry, in fact removing every temptation to guess.

How does it work?

What is a product? A product is an assumption. You think that some people need something, and that something is what you need to build. For Lean Startup proponents, this is when you build an Minimal Viable Product, which is the bare minimum product you can build to test your assumption and nothing else.

Quite a jump, isn’t it? This has very deep implications on the whole project. Nobody likes to kill his own darlings, but here we have a process that does just that and is meant from the very beginning to validate every step you make in the development of a product.

Now that you have your MVP you must, in fact, validate it. This is where things get really interesting and fascinating: the point of Lean Startups is to build a company that lets you learn by introducing the concept of validated learning.

To make it simpler, your MVP must be measurable, and the unit of measurement is validated learning. This part should be well known to product managers, you use metrics like a/b tests, time on page, face to face interviews and many other metrics, to learn how to improve what you just built. What’s different is the context a product manager is moving in, normally we build something because we believe that it’s somewhat needed, and if data tells us the contrary it’s an implementation problem. Lean startups take a wider approach by questioning the existence of the feature itself and it’s usefulness for the customer/market the product is serving, and this changes significantly the way an interview is conducted or data interpreted.

At this point you should have plenty of feedback and data to make an informed decision about your product. If you like your data you just move on to the next feature and start the process from the beginning. If you don’t and the market response was bad, you can pivot.

As recently happened to me the market response was really bad, and I indeed learned a lot in the process. I can now isolate the problem rather easily and pivot another solution for serving the same market much better than before - this is what will happen to StyleJam anyway, we will release a different barebones product sooner or later to validate the concept, under a different name.

I obviously only scratched the surface of what really is the Lean Startup process, but I think that the point that product management must radically change to survive is pretty clear. As always happens, revolutions don’t happen through a radical change of the tools or basic concepts, but through a radical change of perspective.

Product managers, face it, you might be wrong, embrace the change and reduce waste.

If you want to know more, Eric Ries just published a book. Another book you might be interested in is Ash Maurya’s book. The main difference between the two is that tha latter is more in the form of a manual, while the first is more an explanation of the concepts (with plenty of very interesting examples). I honestly can’t give an advice here, I loved both and both are on my desk right now.

Let’s talk about us…

My guess is that soon enough knowing in detail the Lean Startup process will be a required skill for everybody who cares about product development. If I had to hire a product manager tomorrow, I know for sure that I would ask his familiarity and experience with it.

At the end, as most of you probably already noticed, the Lean Startup process has many things in common with the Agile Software Development methodology, and I believe it will have the same success (hopefully in less time). As with Agile, there’s no magic tool to solve all problems, but only a set of practices to remove risk.

I strongly suggest to start from Eric’s book today (there’s a Kindle version too) and embrace change. It works, trust me.

♥, ngw