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10 min read Product Management

New is Easy but Right is Hard: Hacking Product Management

In this essay, I explain how it is important to adopt the principle of getting the right feature into a product than a new feature.

A great product is a synthesis of technology and business thinking. How do we decide what goes into the product and determine the roadmap of the product? How do we establish the balance between the business and technology of the product? In this post, we discuss some interesting lessons learned on product management and why both business leaders and technologists don’t get it.

“New is easy, but right is hard.”
– Craig Federighi (Head of iOS & Mac OS X, Apple)

Product Management in a Nutshell

Traditionally, product management is a function within the company where a product manager focus on the following objectives: (a) planning the business strategy and analysing the market segmentation, risks and competition out there, (b) figure out the product roadmap and interface with the engineering lead and team to deliver based on the timeline and milestones set, (c) collate customer feedback, both qualitative and quantitative and find ways to build up customer base, (d) figure out the marketing plan using different channels, (e) manage the financials with profit and loss (P&L) and (f) collaborated with cross-functional teams to execute on the product. Of course, if a product does not work out, the product manager can choose to close down the product. Whether it’s a startup or a corporation, a product manager takes responsibility on the success or failure of the product. In a startup during the early stage where it’s just a two to ten men team, the CEO is typically the product manager. In my case, during my tenure as a CTO of the startup, my role was closer to a product manager than an engineering leader, because on top of architecting the platform and planning the product, I have to do the strategic partnerships with 3rd party developers and web publishers, pre or post sales follow up, and collaborated with the business teams to achieve the targets for our company.

In modern day, product managers are no longer limited to someone with a business background. If you examine the interesting technology companies such as Amazon, Facebook or Google in the US (and not in Asia), some product managers rose from the engineering leadership or the companies prefer hiring engineers to be product managers. Having an engineering or scientific background offered some advantages but yet at the same time, it does not mean that the engineering person can rest on the laurels. Like the business person, the engineering type product managers have to break through a steep learning curve and understand basic business fundamentals. The danger is that the engineering type product managers dismiss basic business concepts and do not move away from a technology centricity to a user centricity role.

There exist a chasm between business and technology/engineering leaders. In the world of the business person without any understanding of how things are built and made, they start with the following line of thinking: (a) customers gave feedback that they need X features, (b) determine whether it should be easy to build them without consulting the engineering team and of course, they usually miss out the obvious test cases that might lead the user to unintended consequences and (c) they want the features to be built by tomorrow and of course, they are being pushed back with resistance from engineering teams who would begrudgingly obliged to entertain their request but got their timelines and milestones totally screwed. On the other side, the engineering leader also make a similar set of mistakes: (a) they have the mentality that we built and customers will come, and insist that marketing is a waste of time, (b) insist on technology centricity by being fixed towards certain choice of software without thinking about the constraints of the problem and (c) they do not negotiate with the business owners and I have seen this happening a lot more in Asia where technology teams are just being rolled over by the business teams without pushing back, and in the end, got themselves screwed.

Of course, how do we determine between good and bad product managers? Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the famous venture capital firm, Andressen Horowitz, offered a good essay entitled “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” which gave probably the best answer to how we should measure ourselves to be good product managers.

How do we decide the product roadmap?

Most products usually fail for the following reasons:

Once we understand how product managers can screw up, then it would be easy for me to offer some advice on how we should decide the product roadmap:

A Tale on Product Management: Hacking Google Voice into a SMS server for the United States Market

One of the most interesting things I have done in my career as a product manager is to deploy a simple short message service (SMS) for United States (US) customers to post their updates to our advertising platform in Singapore. This innovation incurred only two days of development time and was done at 5% of the original estimated cost, savings that were crucial to our bootstrapped startup. At that point in time during 2010, I was the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a Singapore-based startup called Chalkboard. Chalkboard was an advertising platform that helped business owners with physical stores target location-based ads to consumers in the vicinity. Chalkboard worked through third party mobile applications or online websites on location aware web browsers.

Our customers were busy owners of small-medium enterprises with little time to deploy daily promotions and advertisements. Therefore, we designed our platform to be as convenient to use as possible. Upon signing up with our service, customers would provide basic information of the business location and the first promotion message (within 140 characters). Promotion messages could come in the form of today’s specials, seasonal offers or discounts or a new product launch. Customers could send as many promotion messages as they want at any time or day, with the latest message replacing the last one. We offered three input methods for them to update their promotion messages. The first method was a web-based interface through our platform. The second method was through a tweet sent from an associated business Twitter account. The last method was to send a SMS message from the business owner’s mobile phone to a designated local number.

The SMS method was very popular in Southeast Asia. Older business owners, who are less tech savvy, often updated their promotion messages using SMS. Our data showed that in Southeast Asia countries (Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia), approximately 50% of our customers used the SMS method, followed by 45% using the web interface and only 5% used Twitter.

By late 2010, our business had expanded to the US. We were about to start deploying our service to trial customers in the city of San Francisco. Due to geographical reasons, deploying the SMS service was a tricky matter. At that point in time, to keep things in context, SMS to web services such as Twilio were not available. If we followed convention to set up an SMS server in the US, it would require us to fly a software engineer to US to do so and incur costs that would be significant to our bootstrapped startup.

Yet, our profiling of US customers and experience in Asia indicated that US business owners above 40 were likely to use the SMS method. It became crucial to validate our hypothesis, as we did not want to alienate this segment of US customers. Any solution had to satisfy the important constraint that we do not stretch both financial and engineering resources.

After brainstorming with my team, we came up with a solution. We worked intensively over two days to build a SMS system consisting of a mobile handset placed in Singapore and a pre-paid SIM card from the US that could receive free incoming SMS. We utilized a free service called Google Voice available in the US. First, we paired the business owner’s local US mobile number with our platform, and informed the business owner to send their latest promotion message to our designated pre-paid US mobile number. The pre-paid SIM card number was linked to a Google Voice account. The SMS from the business owner would reach the Google Voice account in the form of an email. We then extracted the promotion message from the email using the Google Voice API and pushed it to the consumers. This solution incurred only 5% of the estimated cost of setting up a SMS server in the US.

Upon implementing and experimenting our service in the US market, we discovered that very few customers (less than 1%) used the SMS method to input their promotion. Most US customers (70%) used Twitter instead. As there was insufficient traction in the US market with the SMS method, we removed the SMS service and offered only services based on Twitter and the web dashboard.

The impact of this innovation made a difference to how our business would operate in the US. First, it allowed our sales and marketing team to collect quantitative data and understand the profile of our customers in the US. Second, it incurred very little financial and engineering resources, which were then better used building technologies crucial to the core business. Finally, the solution could either be scaled up (by installing a US SMS server) or removed quickly without hassle.

Epilogue

The product manager has to balance between different priorities and aspects on the business of a product. We are often distracted by the competition and not focus on saying no when we need to. Continuously iterate and improve the product is not just engineering but there are other engines such as marketing and sales at work which are part of the whole package. To come back to the theme of the talk, always remember what Craig Federighi says, “New is easy but right is hard.”.

Author’s Note: Here are the slides for the whole talk I have given in Hackers & Painters on 15 Nov 2013 at Blk 71. I thank the organizers for inviting me to do this talk on product management.

New is Easy but Right is Hard: Hacking Product Management from Bernard Leong

References:
[1] Ben Horowitz, “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager
[2] Ken Norton, “How to hire a product manager“.
[3] Ian McAllister, What distinguishes the top 1% of product managers from the top 10%?.
[4] Jeff Weiner, How to Spot the Five-Tool Superstar
[5] Jack Dorsey, The CEO as Chief Editor.
[6] Eric Ries, The Product Manager’s Lament.