Heather McLean

A post from Adam Martin inspired today’s deep thought. In his post, he refers to a form of product management strategy (or rather, anti-strategy) known as “pure, blind, Hope.” I’ve also heard this espoused more romantically as the “if you build it, they will come” approach, though that generally applies to an earlier point in the product lifecycle. It’s a form of hubris that appears frequently at executive-level product management, though people at all levels can be guilty of it.

Generally what happens is that someone comes up with the “killer product idea,” and then pitches it with lots of pizazz and hooplah (typically accompanied by flashy PowerPoint slides) that show how awesome it is and how people are just dying to use it… without actually doing any hard research or formulating an actual plan. They convince the people holding the purse strings to fork over unthinkable sums of money to bring the project to market. Even if it doesn’t flop outright, the lack of vision will eventually sent it into a death spiral, and all the while management will continue to shovel money into the sinking ship in the hopes that a miracle will occur. It’s a bizarre form of product management that I’ve never quite understood even though I see it all the time. To a degree, it contributes to a “muck flinging” approach as well: management will continue to throw products at the wall until one of them sticks.

All of this could be avoided with an actual strategy for building and sustaining the product. Unfortunately, that does require the expenditure of brainpower and legwork to do some research. Important things to know before you ever begin are:

• What is the product’s purpose? Why are we doing this? (“Because it’s cool” can sometimes be a valid answer, but it shouldn’t be the only one.)
• Who is going to use this product? How can we excite them about it and target those potential users specifically without necessarily spending gobs of money to blanket the market with advertising?
• How do we make money off the product at launch? Or, how do we position ourselves to turn a profit later (without relying on additional infusions of capital, preferably)?
• What happens after launch? Where is the product headed in 1 year? 5 years? 10 years?

If those in charge of product development would sit down and answer these basic questions about their products instead of focusing on glitz and glamor, it would go far to stop the habit of dumping money into something that will only wilt and die. Even then, the strategy you came up with at the beginning may not be applicable later; I recommend re-answering these questions from scratch periodically so that you can adjust as needed.