Product Managers? We don't need no stinkin' product managers!
The role of a Product Manager varies company to company so greatly, especially in an early stage startup, that anyone applying for PM jobs still has to ask, "So what will I be doing?" It's not like being the left fielder for the Mets where you can pretty much narrow it down to, "We'd like you to hit, field, and run the bases."
In some companies, you're not so much a Product Manager as you are a Project Manager. Features and ideas come from business, marketing, or upper level management and you're just the translater of functional specs to tech speak, checking boxes in MS Project as things get done. This is a helpful coordination function as a product is being built but often has limited usefulness once something is up and running. At that point, you might see folks from the business side take over the running of the product and its direction.
Other times, the PM is shaping core strategy and really living and breathing all aspects of a product, not just coordinating, but inspiring and collaborating with Engineering, Design, Marketing, Business, etc. They're the ones that let the CEO go to sleep with a clear head because PMs dream of their products.
The interesting question is trying to figure out what, if any, kind of PM your company needs and at what stage. Some would argue that you need a distinct Product function as soon as you start building, not only to be the eyes and ears of the Engineering side. Sometimes, swimming in the open water of deep code, the tech team might not poke their heads up often enough to make sure they're not swimming to Jersey. (As a swim support volunteer in kayaking for Manhattan circumnavigations, I can attest firsthand that this is very important.) Also, it may be important to have a PM insolate and shield the product from the pull of business demands. It's important to insure that your scaleable product business doesn't turn into a custom development shop with the addition of every new business development partner.
What has often surprised me is how often engineers seek out someone in a pure product role. I would have thought that the people doing the building would naturally want to lead the direction of a product, but that's not always the case. Sometimes, engineers become PMs, but its a difficult thing to do both sides at once.
That often happens in startups, and I believe it is to the detriment of the end product. You can do all the user testing you want, but its important to have a fresh perspective on a product, especially when it comes to interpreting user feedback.
So what should the background of a good product manager be?
First of all, you need to have extraordinary communications skills. You not only need to coordinate a lot of different areas, but you need to make sure everyone feels like their feedback is important and you need to be able to synthesize a lot of different needs and goals. After all, listening is half of communication.
I think the next most important thing is empathy. You need to have a feel for what users want to do with your product and how they want to interact with it, even if you yourself don't necessarily represent that demographic. A lot of this comes with knowing a lot of different types of people pretty deeply and being genuinely curious about the human condition and how people operate.... being aware of lots of other "selves".
Breadth is important, too. You need to know a little bit about a hell of a lot of things...kinda like a utility infielder. (For the record, on my softball teams, I've played leftfield, center, short, third, first and pitched and that's only in six games so far.)
Attention to detail is important, too, but not necessarily in the way you might think. Products change and no one gets every last detail right the first time, but I think it's more important to be deep in your work and not just comprehensive. So, if you're creating a suite of tools, one damn good one is better than five so-so ones. That will at least hook some users who will anxiously await the development of the other tools.
Is it fun? Sure...but I have to say that one of the most difficult things is not just being able to sit back and be a run of the mill passionate user, because you're too busy bug fixing, speccing the next feature and thinking about marketing to participate as much as you'd like to in the community of users.
The Doghouse
You ever just complete drop the ball with something in the worst possible scenario, have no legitimate excuse for it, and of course, you do it for the second time with the only other person or group you've done it to before.
Brain, why do you mock me?
Ugh.
XM Radio Suspends Opie and Anthony for 30 days: 1 Amendment Down, 26 to Go
Unless, of course, what you want to listen to is morally objectionable. Then, you'll just have to go on the internet, where morally objectionable content is pretty much free. We won't feature that trash no matter how much we're charging you for "premium" radio.
XM just suspended Opie & Anthony (You know those guys who featured people having sex in a church on their show, who told everyone the Mayor of Boston died in a car accident...) for comments made on their show last week by a homeless person who referenced some despicable sexual behavior directed at Condi Rice and the First Lady.
If I was an XM subscriber, I'd cancel my subscription today... not because I find that particular thing funny... I don't... It's wrong and it's awful... it's the hypocrisy.
The last time I checked, we have Freedom of Speech in this country, right? Well, sort of. You're not allowed to scream fire in a crowded theatre, because your speech might cause harm to others.
Well, sort of... because, it is a fact that when the media portrays high profile murders and suicides, there are identifiable instances of copycatting that lead to people's deaths... I mean, we know that the Virginia Tech killer referenced the Columbine kids by name...
But then, we go and cheer on David Blaine when he wants to go jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. Wanna start making bets on how many kids start jumping off bridges in this country after that gets televised?
So then it becomes more about offending people than causing actual harm to others. If you are offended by something, and you have a good PR firm working for you, you can basically get anyone else fired or off the air... even if those airwaves aren't public. Suspending Opie and Anthony from XM is like suspending porn actresses from the Playboy Channel. Certainly there are lots of people offended by the Playboy Channel... shouldn't we be taking away people's right to smut in that situation, too?
The firings of Imus, JV and Elvis, and now the O&A suspensions are a snowballing witch hunt. Do I support what those people say? No... but I support their right to say whatever I want. It's the same with flag burning. I don't support anyone burning the flag in this country, but I wouldn't stand in the way of anyone's right to burn it. That's what freedom is.
And really, how in the hell does Howard Stern avoid all this?
This is a really dangerous precedent we're setting here. We expect all this Web 2.0 user generated content to be successful in the face of this culture of fear? Who in their right mind would opening share their thoughts with the world in this climate. We're a bunch of crazy people... we must be, because its only a matter of time before the bandwagon shows up at your door.
I mean, as it is, I can never run for President because of this post and I'm sure there are others like it that people could pull apart out of context and fuel the media machine with.
And the worst part about it... XM and all these other radio stations totally knew what they were doing when they hired these folks... and what you never see are executive's heads roll. It's not the fault of the talent. You want to suspend someone... suspend the people that oversee the talent.. because what they realize is that nice doesn't drive revenues on the radio, and these stations are hiring these shockjocks to generate cold hard cash. It's a business and they knew exactly what they were getting, so they shouldn't act all surprised and offended when stuff like this happens.
Look... there will be people in your life you won't agree with. There will be others you will be offended by. Others will try to hurt you with words. The best thing you can do is ignore them. Ignore them and they'll go away. If people ignored Opie & Anthony they'd be off the air in a heartbeat... but that's not happening. People are listening. People want to hear.
I don't want to be censored, protected, etc... Just give me the tools and I'll do it myself, because I don't trust the religious right, special interests, or least of all the government to do it for me.
In other news, the Rev. Jerry Falwell was so happy over today's news that he kicked it. Also, our soldiers are now banned from participation in the conversation, so sit there in the desert and like it and whatever you do, we don't want to here or watch a peep out of you.
Open? Participatory? Free? Yeah, right.
Testing out Meebo Rooms...in this post
There is now a Meebo Room in this post... Click through on RSS to check it out...
Ok... I took it off b/c it kept autoplaying the videos...
What's next for Twitter?: 5 possible directions for everyone's favorite SMS crack
Now that Twitter has been spun off into its own company, and the team there is hustling to keep up with scaling, you gotta figure we'll here a funding announcement sometime soon. It's not like Twitter is free to run. All these SMSs are costing the company money everyday.
First off, who are the likely VCs... or rather.. where would the money come from? Sometimes, when deals are this hot, you almost expect them to take money from some completely unexpected source. I could see all these bigshot Valley VCs marching in trying to throw endless amounts of money at the company at ridiculous valuations (you know, because of that big hockey stick) and I imagine that's probably somewhat of a turnoff. (Hopefully anyway.) I wouldn't be surprised if you see a big band of angels get together and pony up a million dollars to solve scaling issues and get this thing scalable.... and if that's the case, Calcanis would be all over it. As it is, he wants to pay for a premium level of the service. Plus, given is "Entreprenuer in Action" role at Sequoia, whatever that means, he certainly has a connection to deeper coffers if they so desire. Sequoia would also be a prime candidate because of the Google funding, and Google bought Evan William's first big success, Blogger, so I'm sure there are probably some connections there.
Ok, so once the money gets raised, what are the likely things that Twitter goes off and becomes?
Neat del.icio.us tip: Tagging for yourself vs. readlater
From Hannah the Instigator...
Instead of tagging something "readlater" in del.icio.us, a tag you're not likely to ever go back to again and without a way to check if you actually read it, tag it "for:" yourself. This way, when you tag stuff for:yourscreename", it sits in your "for" inbox until you actually click on it to read it.
I don't trust any of you people
Tara wrote a post about trust yesterday that struck me. I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about what social means and should mean in terms of technology, especially as our social technology starts to make its way into the more private areas of our lives, like our finances. Do Web 2.0 philosophies hold up in the design of social software for the most important parts of our mainstream lives? I am sensing from my non-techy friends a kind of Web 2.0 backlash against all the openness and sharing, and while I still believe that open is better, I believe that when, where, and how are key questions that Web 2.0 has yet to flush out in order to start moving away from the bleeding edge.
So, back to Tara's post. She wrote the following statement:
I disagree and don't think that's how it actually works. People aren't actually good. They're self interested.
However, it is generally in your own self interest to be a good person most of the time, because then other people will be good back to you and then you also don't have to deal with the penalties for being an asshole (poor reputation, retaliation from others, alienation, prison, perhaps...).
That's a key difference, especially when it comes to the design of social software. Take seller ratings, for example. I bought some nice pieces from Bethany Cooper the other day. Do I trust her? Not particularly. I don't know her. Although, if I had to make a bet, unless she's an idiot, if she's interested in succeeding in such a public platform, she's probably not in the business of screwing people over on a regular basis. So, she's probably good, but since I don't have any reason to trust her, I'll make my judgment based on the 1200 positive experiences that people have had with her according to her seller rating... which amounts to 100%. In this case, while people are likely to be good, technology doesn't force us to depend on trust.
She could still, however, steal candy from babies in her spare time, so there's also context around trust. I may not trust her to drive my car, but I trust her to send me some beautiful handmade stuff on time.
Open source works the same way. Are people involved in the open source community generally good people? Maybe, but not always. Are they contributing to the open source community out of selflessness or some interest in the greater good of humanity? Maybe, but not necessarily. In fact, many open source contributors are writing code that solves their own problems. At that point, giving that code back, so that others might improve on it and also share code with them in the future is of greater value to them than hoarding code and not sharing. Sounds "good" but what's really going on is that they've recognized that they're simply better off, from a utility standpoint, sharing.
It's the Prisoner's Dilemma. Two prisoners are being interrogated separately and if they squeal on each other, they have a better outcome than if only one of them squeals. However, if they both keep their mouth's shut, they both get off easy. Without communication and information on what the other person has done before, it isn't likely that these two will cooperate, but if you repeat the experiment a number of times, eventually, they'll learn that the better outcome is to work together. Is that trust, or just two people maximizing utility in a world of free communication and discoverable information?
Trust has nothing to do with it. It's about incentive, reputation, and access to information. Don't ask me to trust you... give me the tools for you to figure out whether I'm trustworthy... or tell me some friends we have in common.
That's why, for example, when social applications like Facebook and Vox were built, they focused on privacy... making sure that the right people saw the right information about you. Privacy is going to be a huge factor in the mainstreamification of Web 2.0, especially in the current culture of fear that's being spread.
Trust me.
It's about time... David Blaine to jump off Brooklyn Bridge
I'll be there right under the bridge with my kayak to smack him on the head with my paddle on the off chance he actually pops back up alive from under the water.
I think it's just a trick to get rid of this idiot once and for all. We'll let him jump, and then he'll realize there are no boats in the water to pick him up... no rescue divers. Hopefully, we'll just get swept out to see and we'll never have to hear about his next idiotic stunt.
"I don't see any boats under there..."
"Trust me, they're under the bridge... they just don' t want to get in the way."
Perfect weather for kayaking this weekend
A few slow mornings at the boathouse, but I did get visits from Matt Myers from 30elm and Josephine Dorado.
What does "social" mean and who needs it?
Fred and I had an interesting e-mail exchange the other day about his theory that "Every web service should be social."
I hesitated to go that far, mostly because I'm feeling a little personal backlash against the idea of every service being explicitly social.
Take WebMD, for example. Maybe one day, I'll be able to login to WebMD and get all my personal medical history there, but for now, its a good place to get questions answered like, "What is this purple growth on my pinky toe?"
That's not exactly the kind of question I want to broadcast to a group, nor do I want an armchair diagnosis from Louise from Chattenooga. I also don't want to be friends with other people with purple growths on their pinky toes. In fact, if WebMD were suddenly morphed into a more explicit social sharing community about health, I actually might be less inclined to use it and so would others, because its not necessarily the kind of think the mainstream is comfortable being social about.
However, that doesn't mean the fact that 34% of all 27 year old males in Bay Ridge have this issue isn't useful to me. "People like you...", a concept Amazon pioneered and really nailed, is indeed a very powerful social feature. But, if you asked most people, you wouldn't normally think of Amazon as a "social" web service.
Would Amazon be even better if they became a social network and aggregated all my reviews, purchases, etc. into profiles? Can I have Amazon friends? Clearly, not every user would necessarily want their Amazon purchases so prominently displayed, but giving people the option to publish a public profile could be an interesting move for them.
So, what I'm saying is... aggregated social data can be a fantastic addition to a site, but making the core of your service to be explicitly social may not be. It goes back to the idea that a service needs to work if you're the only user and you don't care about the community. del.icio.us worked at one user in a way that Digg never would.
Allowing users to commune... that can also be an added feature, but it's important to make sure that it doesn't alienate users who aren't interested. There are many people who don't want their web experience to be social. They see the web as convenient, easy, on demand, but social isn't necessarily want out of their web, even if us designers and product managers and VC think that makes the web universally better.
Social doesn't always mean friends and a public profile... it can mean data aggregation, design, filtering... and be careful about alienating the people who want to just buy their Slurpee without having to tell the guy at the 7-11 counter about their kids and where they're from.
Hudson River Office Hours: Kayaking Starts Saturday
I absolutely love the opportunities this blog and nextNY have afforded me to meet lots of interesting and passionate people in NYC.
The problem is, I never have time to meet all of them... and when I do, it seems to be all of them at once, and I can't sit down for more than two minutes at a time with someone.
....except during the summer, where I aften spend endless amounts of time completely available to anyone... anyone who'd like to go kayaking anyway. (Or if you just want to hangout by the water, but that's no fun...)
Yup, kayaking season is starting again at the Downtown Boathouse this Saturday. We have three locations: Pier 40 (by Houston St.), Pier 96 (W56th St) and 72nd St. in Riverside Park.
This summer, I'll be manning the one down at Pier 40 almost every Saturday, and most Sundays, too. We open at 9AM and the last boat generally goes out at 5:30, but since we're all volunteers, that's sort of flexible. This Saturday, though, I'll be out there at 9AM sharp if anyone would like to go for a paddle or just hang around the dock. I'll probably stay until 3PM.
So if you want to talk shop, talk kayaking, talk about the Mets, or just say hi, you're welcome to come by anytime!