Kimisms- aka Truisms in Product
Anyone who’s worked with me has been subject to a Kim-ism at some point. I throw out these quips because they get people thinking…I decided to write them all down...
“If you concentrate on the pebbles (vs the big rocks) you’ll wake up in a year having not accomplished anything”
There’s a story about rocks/pebbles/sand in a jar, if you put the sand in first you’ll never be able to fit in the big rocks, but if you put in the rocks first, the pebbles and sand will fit around them (the story is about life balance, but I’ve turned it into a roadmap analogy :)). Working closely with the leadership team to identify those big rocks for the year, that we hope to change the trajectory of the business, they go in first. Then work through those iterative items that the PMs can do to help improve the outcomes of the business (whether that’s metrics/funnel/retention items), and finally sand- KTLO/Maintenance/tech debt. You need to find your balance of those items, but starting with the big rocks will make sure that you’re still focused on the business’ big bets.
“You are not your target market”
I have to give credit where credit is due, when I took my pragmatic marketing courses way back on product management they hammered this into my head. Even if you used to be a user of the software you’re now working on, once you start working at a company you are no longer your target market. You know too much about the product, you know too much about the market, your feedback is too informed. Hot tip, get brand new employees to do a review of the product ON THEIR FIRST DAY before they know too much. Saying “I am a customer so I know” is not true. You care about your product, you are motivated to see it succeed. Talk to the people who don’t care about your product, and get their feedback, it’ll be enlightening.
“Avoid Bathtub thinking”- talk to the market and get some data
I worked with 2 CEOs (who shall remain nameless) in my years at startups that would come into the office in the morning, and trot up to my desk and say “I was thinking in my bathtub last night, and we need to build X”. Don’t get me wrong they were always pretty cool ideas, but more often than not they were based on no problem our customers had, or any data we had seen. So what do you do in that situation? Get curious. Understand what they mean, why they thought of that, and get out there and validate it. Talk to the market (and by market I mean customers, and prospects) and look at your data. Can you validate this idea? Does it have legs? (other than the ones in the bathtub LOL) It probably won’t look like what they thought up in the end, but the kernel will probably have value.
As I put this together, I realize I have a bunch of quotes about building things without market demand: This one comes in many forms over the years, because in tech we LOVE building, but is it the right thing? This is where a good “Field of Dreams” movie reference is relevant here “If we build it, they will come” …or not.
One customer does not make a market - This one probably came from Pragmatic Marketing too, but I’ve seen it a million times. So you meet up with a customer, and they tell you about a problem they have, you think AHA fantastic, I’ll build a feature to solve that. Slow down there, trigger. One customer does not make a market. How can you size that problem? Who else has that problem? How big is the portion of your customers that have that problem? Can you corroborate this with other data from the market? I like to use the “3 data points is triangulation” approach. See if you can get market data, usage data, competitor data to validate this problem before you dive in, if you find it from 3 sources, you’re probably onto something.
“Just because your competitor does it, doesn’t mean you should”- It’s so easy to get caught up in the competitor features arms race. They’ve got it, so we had better add it. As someone who was a competitive analyst waaaay back in my first years in software, I understand the temptation. But how do you know if they built something that is based on market feedback or bathtub thinking? You don’t! So see if you can figure out if your customers have that problem before you dive straight into feature copying mode.
“That’s a solution looking for a problem” & “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should” & “Shiny Object Syndrome” I seem to have a lot of expressions on this topic. Technology solutions come and go, and the ones that stick around are the ones that actually solve problems for customers. Start with the customer problem and if there’s a technology tool that can help you solve it go for it! But starting from a technology and trying to find a problem to solve is a road to disaster.
When I look back at this list it looks there’s a lot of reasons NOT to build something, and I agree with that too. You have limited resources (time, people and money) and you want to make sure you’re building the right thing.