Growing

Short post — but just an observation too long for Twitter.

You know what’s better than actually pushing an initial product out the door after its inception? Watching it grow — the actual “management” part of product management. This is where you learn how users react to it, and where you see the market inputs you’ve setup start to fill up with ideas and opportunities.

And when you start to see common themes across different inputs you have setup, that’s when you know you are going in the right direction.

There will always be critics and naysayers. And you can always get better.

You will always need to enhance, tweak — and generally make things better.

That’s the fun part of product management to me, because it’s when you see the whole product really start to come together. At least in Web start-ups, at the beginning, cross-functional teams are very loosely defined and may (or may not) really know how to work together.

But as you fight the battles, and take the wins and the losses with one another, that’s when you all start to build a product that’s really awesome.

I’m in the early days of this stage of a product right now (moving away from the introductory cycles and in to the growth stages, where the stakes are higher).

The business will transition along with the product (if the product is the business, which is common in start-ups) and you need to learn to roll with it.

It’s never perfect. It’s never done. Things always need to change and get better; just so long as you maintain focus and have the confidence you are moving in the right direction (and keep everyone informed and open to receiving input) you are doing all that you can to grow that product in the right direction.

Tagged as: Business, knowledge, Planning, startups