The Productologist

I was stuck in Chicago on my way to a trade show recently, waiting for my connection to Miami get delayed more and more, so I pulled out the latest issue <12Mar2007> of BusinessWeek. Disclaimer: I have a love/hate relationship with Business Week. Some of the articles/columns are well-written, comprehensive and balanced, providing a unique look at a company or business situation.

Others read like they were written by a publicist or just skim the surface, failing to find out answers to deeper questions.

I found myself browsing (BW mockingly calls it skimming) the first several pages of the magazine when I came upon an column by Stephen H. Wildstrom about the recent flood of web-based replacements for MSFT’s Office suite. The title of the column was Goodbye to Office? Not Yet, which caught my eye because I always find it entertaining to read about the next up-and-comer company/product that is going to displace MSFT in the Enterprise/Education/Personal/Whatever space.

The article is more specifically a review of Transmedia’s Glide OS 2.0, which aims to go beyond just replacing Office applications, but also many other consumer-oriented desktop software packages such as photo-editing, file-sharing, and media players. The author points out that there are already several other web-based options for users who want something besides MSFT’s offering, including Google , ThinkFree and Zoho. There is also Sun’s OpenOffice, which I am currently using to write this post because it can be run from a USB thumb drive.

I’m not a fan of switching from installed software to hosted software for applications that don’t require an Internet connection, especially with cheap, compact storage so readily available, so I read about new services like Transmedia’s with a critical eye. As I read the review of the software, I stopped when I saw the following quote from the author,

Glide’s main shortcoming is that it tries to do too many things and doesn’t do many of them particularly well yet.“

It is not my intention to defame Glide (whose software is labeled with the ubiquitous “beta” moniker) or any of the other hosted desktop applications, but the statement above reminds me of one of the primary challenges of Product Management: How to add features and capabilities, without losing sight of the core value of the product.

As Product Managers, we are all bombarded with feature enhancement requests from sales, customers, technical support, executive staff, our moms and friends and maybe even neighbors. It’s our job to figure out how to wade through the noise and find the Gold. The Gold are those features, enhancements and bugs that keep customers happy, win new business and generate revenue for the company. Sometimes it’s obvious, like when you hear the same request from a variety of channels (e.g., Sales and Support or a customer roundtable). It’s not as easy when there are conflicts between existing customer requests and new business requests.

I don’t mean that there is conflict in that existing customers want the product to do one thing and prospects want it to do another. Rather, I mean that when you have a finite release window or limited development resources, the Product Manager has to make choices about which features and bugs get priority and which do not.

Ultimately the choice comes down to Wider vs. Deeper and I recommend Deeper. I say this because although it seems logical to want to provide the greatest amount of functionality, the opposite is frequently the better choice. Having a product that does a single, thing well is preferable to one that does many things just ok (or even worse, poorly). This is due to the fact that users MAY remember what worked, but they will NEVER FORGET what didn’t work, and you may not have a second chance to win back their confidence.

When you are considering whether to focus on fixing something that users have complained about or adding a new feature, fix the problem. When it’s locked down, then start thinking about what you can add to enhance their experience. That way, you’ll never have to read a quote about your product that reads, “It’s a great concept, but short on execution.“

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 9:12 am PT and is filed under Best Practices, Processes, Publications, Usability.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.