When exploring new market opportunities, why are people so eager to jump the gun?
As soon as everyone starts ta
lking about something new, all of these “great” features just start popping-up out of thin air – without much merit or though behind them. I could come up with a million cliches for this – cart before horse, the chicken and the egg, etc, etc…
If you are examining a potential new market opportunity, slow down. Things don’t have to be, and will never be, 100% correct before making that first sale.
Your price will be wrong. The code will have bugs. You will screw up delivering adequate service to the client. All that stuff will happen – so getting over it early will do you a world of good.
Take the time to make sure you are doing things the correct way. Make sure you at least take different aspects in to consideration – who are the initial prospects, for example? Are you satisfying their needs? Even more importantly, what ARE their needs?
If you don’t have answers to the most basic product question(s) (i.e., “what is the product going to solve?” or “what opportunity presents itself by solving this problem that I think exists?”) you are already in over your head. Productization will only get you in to a world of hurt unless you have the appropriate discussions with the appropriate people to determine what it is you are trying to do.
Then, and only then, can you start to proceed down the path of forming ideas around possible solutions by way of a product. You may realize you are only talking about a feature to an existing product. Hell, you may find the opportunity doesn’t even exist at all.
Remember. when everyone else is dreaming of bright lights, and their names on the marquees, its your job to reign them back in a bit. Bring them back down to earth with the fundamentals. You can’t get caught up in this blue sky crap as a PM – chances are, if you do, you will only hurt the product in the end.
Of course it’s great to “dream big” and think of all the “cool stuff” a product can do. Don’t limit yourself, and possible solutions to a problem to the same old boring and basic stuff. You can’t ignore the cool factor.
All I’m saying is – don’t let those grand ideas run away from the basics because it’s the easiest thing to do. Trust me – users will not benefit.
So when everyone is crying for “out of the box” and a “complete solution” – ignore them. If you don’t know what the basic problem is (regardless of how critical it may seem), you need to either evaluate again, or put your hand up and say, “I don’t get it.”
Your customers / clients / users will thank you for it – and isn’t that what being a PM is all about?