The Pollinator: Exploratory Issue

Note to the small handful of SDGers receiving this email. This email is a rough test of a product newsletter idea. Look for a meeting on your calendars to discuss.

Note to anyone else who has happened upon this issue of the Pollinator. Congratulations! You have found the exploratory issue of the SDG Pollinator, a newsletter that Solution Design Group will soon begin publishing. The thing you see below will look much like the first issues that we distribute to external subscribers. If you like it, please subscribe.

From the Editor: To guide a product’s future, know its history

My SDG colleagues and I have been working with a business on a new Web product that is replacing and refreshing a venerable Cobol-based hosted application. We were asking the client team about the purpose of some particular function or field in the original product, and the product manager said, "That? I don't really know what it is for. But it's been in the software since the '70s."

That sentence floored me. The 1970s! That's the decade when I was born. That's the decade of the Steel Curtain and the Purple People Eaters (skol!), of Taxi Driver and Star Wars, of KISS and Stevie Wonder. While the Vikings were losing Super Bowls and John Travolta was dancing to the Bee Gees, the early versions of this very software product I am working on now were being used by real customers to do real work.

It got me thinking about digital products’ histories.

We modern software makers and designers often think that the products we work on are inherently novel, that our ideas for solving a problem or generating a result are unprecedented. But while in the scope of human existence, sure, software is relatively new (so are "pants"), by now, in 2023, software has actually got quite a rich little history.

When we encounter a product, and especially when we manage a product, we should take the time understand the story of the product and its users. It may go back longer than you realize. It might be older than you are. Things you might not understand may have a specific, long-standing purpose. Conversely, functions that are embedded in the core product might only be there because they always have. Be willing to question their usefulness.

Because only if we understand a product’s history can we really shape its future.

On to the garden,

Around the Garden

Product at Notion

I love peeking inside business’s product processes, teams, and leadership. Product maestro Lenny Ratchisky, who is always interviewing interesting people in product, recently got a great tour of product practices at Notion, a documentation and collaboration tool that’s beloved among the tech community. Choice quotes:

“In terms of how teams operate within each quarter, one thing philosophically is that I don’t like mandating organization-wide process approaches—at least in terms of how teams run themselves.”

“We’ve discovered, though, that async check-ins don’t work for some types of discussions. What are all the options you explored, and how do you think about each of them? Why did you choose them? Putting that in a doc and explaining that in writing takes a lot of time…So we’re tweaking our approach right now…we’re going to start focusing on in-person discussions with the team.”

“We have a unified product and technology organization—engineering, product management, design, data, user research, and security all roll up to me.”

Check it out: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-notion-builds-product

Hyperact on product constraints

Dave Baines and his gang at Hyperact are doing some great stuff with their small product consulting firm in the UK. They’re also a prolific and insightful producer of product content. I loved his post last month on managing product constraints. He identifies 11 constraints faced by product managers and teams. I especially appreciated this bit about overcoming the user-access constraint:

"In B2C, then there’s nothing stopping you arranging our own sessions, other than perhaps budget and time…In B2B, speak to your sales teams. To your account managers. You may be surprised at how simple it actually is to drop in on a sales call, or to make a cameo on a fortnightly account review call to ask a few questions or get feedback on a prototype."

Great advice for everyone. Remember: getting to know your users is fundamental to product management. If you must be scrappy to do so, then be scrappy. By all means, get out of the building!

Check it out: https://www.hyperact.co.uk/blog/managing-common-constraints

Product Talk on outcomes and business results

Hope Gurion and Teresa Torres of Product Talk are great leaders and practitioners of product. Here they chat at length about connecting a product's outcomes (a product manager’s second favorite word, after maybe) to business fundamentals, like revenue or cost.

A product manager who masters outcomes and their connection to business results will be living like a pig in mud: both successful and happy.

Check it out: https://www.producttalk.org/2023/04/connecting-product-outcomes-to-revenue-and-costs/

Meanwhile at SDG: HMML Manuscript Library

Here at Solution Design Group, we're working on several interesting projects (when aren’t we?). Here’s one of our cooler ongoing efforts: we provide digital strategy and technical chops for a university and museum that maintains a digital manuscript library. Scholars use this system to catalog ancient texts from around the world. If Indiana Jones used digital products, this is a product he’d use. A few years ago, this system was even featured on 60 Minutes.

Check it out: https://solutiondesign.com/case_studies/hill-museum/ 

Outside the box

In entirety unrelated news, check out A Soft Murmur, a customizable ambient noise generator. You can tune it with your perfect mix of waves, rain, birds, crickets, and more. And now I’m feeling sleepy…

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free monthly publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• The Pollinator is distributed to anyone currently or recently in a product consulting engagement with SDG, but anyone interested in the topic is welcome to subscribe. Recipients are encouraged to forward The Pollinator to anyone who might appreciate it.

• Solution Design Group is a product, technology, and strategy consulting firm based in Minneapolis, MN, USA. We are 100% employee owned by our staff of 200+ consultants and operational staff. SDG works with technology and business leaders in numerous industries to innovate, build, and transform.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.