The Productologist

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

I have been meaning to read this seminal text on application development and usability for some time (read: years), but somehow it always ended up on my reading list just below something else. After seeing some others reference the book and discuss conference talks where the author expanded on his theorems, I decided to bump The Inmates are Running the Asylum to the top of the list. After finishing it up, I was surprised, to say the least.

Many years ago, when I was going off to start grad school, BW (at the time, she wasn’t BW, just B) and I rented a big yellow truck to haul all of our prized personal belongings to our new home (at least for the next two years). It was a long trip (2 days worth of driving), so we did the prudent traveler thing and went to AAA and got a bunch of maps to plan our route. The maps were not only for us, but others, too. Since this was the age before cell phone ubiquity, for safety reasons, we gave a copy to BW’s parents so that they would know what route we were following in case we didn’t show up at our destination or check in periodically.

One of my goals for this year is to establish Product Councils for my products. Product Councils, or Product Advisory Boards, as they are sometimes called, are made up of people who are familiar with your product and/or the market. In most cases, they are external, meaning that the members are customers or industry experts who can provide strategic guidance or provide feedback on tactical implementations, but they can also be made up of, wholly or in part, internal members.

I plan to have two; one made up of internal team members and one made up of customers. Both are necessary to help me grow the product to meet the needs of the market.

Whenever my BW gets asked what I do (and it’s suprisingly often), she usually just says, “Oh, he’s in Marketing…he does stuff with technology.” Now that may sound like BW is a little ditzy, but she’s not. In fact, she has an advanced degree and is one of the smartest people I know.

The problem is that my chosen career, Product Management, doesn’t register with most people who aren’t in high tech.