Principii del Pollinator

This past month our SDG product Slack channel was home to a healthy conversation about product principles. We shared some articles — and some opinions.

Through this discussion and a review of others’ good thinking (and “review of others’ good thinking” is what we do here at The Pollinator), I’ve found myself with a clearer understanding of, well, good principles for good principles.

• Product principles should represent your product distinctly. Don’t make them so broad that they could serve any well-meaning, ambitious company. Imagine some smart, thoughtful outsiders who know your brand or product well — like your most loyal customers — are shown several sets of principles for similar companies. These readers should be able to identify which principles are yours.

• Product principles should connect your organization’s mission to your tactical product-making. They fill a critical gap.

• Write principles to direct action or behavior. It helps to structure them as imperative verb phrases. Do this. Be that. Act like this.

• Finally, product principles should serve as a shortcut to good decisions. You might find it helpful to reflect on a real-life situation where you were facing a couple of decent options, and then imagine how your principles could help you make the right decision for your product.

All this got me thinking about product principles for this modest newsletter, The Pollinator. I’ll be bold and declare them here.

Initial Product Principles for The Pollinator

1. Act like a trusted guide to a rich, meaningful landscape.

2. Speak as ourselves (Jason, et al) while proudly representing our firm (SDG).

3. Be unreasonably generous.

4. Inspire and motivate; don’t direct and dictate.

5. Cultivate a garden of product practices and perspectives.

I hope you’ve seen these principles at work already in our humble Pollinator. If they don’t seem to be working, we can adapt them — principles, like gardens, have strong roots, and can grow in many directions.

On to the garden,

Around the Garden

Cagan Clarifies Product Risk Taxonomies

Check it out: Clarifying Product Risk Taxonomies, Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG)

Recently I spoke at the Tech Days event of a long-time SDG customer. This was a multi-day virtual conference attended by their developers and others associated with their product and technology function.

I had a nice 45-minute talk planned, and my script and slides included a few choice references from product experts. Early in my talk I planned to revisit one of my favorite product formulations: Marty Cagan’s well-known quote about the job of a product manager being to discover the product that is usable, valuable, and feasible, from his original Inspired book (and I mean the 2008 original).

But the very morning of the SDG customer’s Tech Days event I read this article on Clarifying Product Risk Taxonomies from that same Marty Cagan. He revisits his famed valuable-useable-feasible formulation, and suggests that there’s a type of product risk this triad might overlook: viability for your business. In Cagan’s words: “I kept encountering the problem where the product team would focus on customer value, but would gloss over business value.“

This little clarifier had me rethinking how to frame the triad to find room for viability, or business risk. Needless to say, I hurriedly updated my slides and my script to reflect this deeper understanding. I’m glad I encountered Cagan’s article that morning of the event, and not a day later.

I will say, however: the best part of Cagan’s definition of product management remains the verb, to discover. If he ever changes that, I might lose a piece of my soul.

Paths to Product-Market-Fit

Check it out: Eight Founder Journeys to Product-Market Fit, Robert Kaminski, Fletch (on LinkedIn).

I saw this graphic shared on LinkedIn recently, and then it popped up on the Network I Once Knew as Twitter. It’s from a product marketing firm called Fletch and one of their principals, Robert Kaminski.

Here’s what I like about this diagram.

• It recognizes a variety of potential starting points for a product. I’d call these motivators, not north stars. This variability in starting points is insightful. Some great products are motivated by new tech; some by a problem; some by a market. I’m impressed with the simplicity and the broad applicability of this schema.

• But that starting point isn’t enough. At some point every product will need to wrestle with each of these nodes. But they come in different orders depending on the business or market.

• The emphasis on product-market fit is good. That’s what we product leaders are trying to get to.

• The split between market-then-product (the left half) models vs. product-then-market (the right half) models is really interesting. I tend to favor the left-style approaches (find products for your customers instead of finding customers for your products), but this helps explain contexts for all models.

To be clear, there are a couple of things I don’t like about this visualization. For example, I’m not a fan of the way it attributes these journeys solely to ”founders.” I tend to get grumpy when product or business thinkers venerate the individual founder-entrepreneur and minimize the role of a cross-functional, empowered product team. Power to the people, I say.

But setting that aside, it’s worth spending time with this diagram. Think about how it might apply to your own business or product. Which is your business’s entry point on the path to product-market fit? Where are you in your journey today? What will you need to focus on next?

Productboard’s Product Story

Check it out: Productboard’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Building a Unicorn Company with Lean Startup Principles, Todd Jackson, First Round Review

This one’s a bit meta: an article about the product strategy and product management of a company that makes products for product strategy and product management. Productboard is a well known SaaS product for product managers. First Round Review recently profiled their rise and interviewed their founder, Hubert Palan. I learned a lot from this interview. Some things that stand out:

• The depth and intensity of Productboard’s pre-launch discovery and research. “Palan and [co-founder and CTO Daniel] Hejl spent April 2013 to April 2014 knee-deep in customer discovery and prototyping…they conducted more than 1,000 customer interviews … What started as problem interviews gradually evolved into solution interviews, where they tested 13 different prototypes.”

• Their focus on a particular customer segment. “Palan said, ‘I made a very intentional decision that we were going to start with customers who fit the target profile of an early stage, digital-first startup with strong customer-centric, product-led culture, with one product team, building a single (ideally) B2B product. That helped me narrow the focus.’”

• Lightweight prototyping using widely available office applications. “Palan built a super lightweight version of the solution on Keynote slides, and if people responded positively and the co-founders felt the idea had legs, then and only then, would Hejl spend time fleshing it out.”

• Their sense of history. Palan took a selfie on the day he conceived of the company, realizing this was a moment he might want to commemorate. Good product managers serve as de facto archivists and historians of their products, stashing screenshots of early wireframes, snapping pictures of key meetings, recording a whiteboard for posterity.

Think you need a “Sweeping Vision”? Nah. Just sweep the streets.

Check it out: Startups don’t need product managers who are visionaries, Jon Sadow, in Venture Beat 

This great Venture Beat article from 2019 — which one of you subscribers sent me! — reminds us that the best work of product management is often found in the little things. As its writer, Jon Sadow, says:

I love how he frames these quotidian tasks as “sweeping the streets,” and how he positions this important, mundane work against the big vision and strategy work that’s the subject of so much thinking and writing about product roles. Just sweep the streets consistently and you’ll likely end up with a successful product, Sadow argues.

I’ll confess to finding this article to be a great reminder for me, personally. My own Myers-Briggs type, ENTP, is sometimes called the Visionary type. We’re known as confident, creative, enthusiastic, big-picture thinkers, but we are at risk of losing track of details and dismissing scut-work in favor of sky-writing. I wonder if we’re over-represented among product leaders. If you’re a fellow visionary-type who sometimes gets caught up in eloquently expressing an inspiring vision, you too might appreciate Sadow’s paean to the product-manager-as-street-sweeper. I think I might get a little desktop broom as a reminder.

Outside the box

Huemint is a color palette generator that builds color palettes based on machine learning algorithms and color theory. There’s some complex math behind it. It’s a great way to devise a well-balanced palette for anything — a logo, a wardrobe, a paint job. My favorite feature: once you see one color you like, lock it. Then regenerate the palette around your locked colors, progressively locking more colors until your palette is complete. https://huemint.com/about/

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free 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.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned business and technology consulting company. From ideation to implementation, we help transform organizations through well-made and well-loved digital products. Utilizing our customer-centric approach, and our wide array of capabilities, we deliver innovative solutions that drive business growth and success for our customers.

• 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.