The Productologist

Steve Kaufmann posted an article over at Dumb Little Man about how not everything requires How-To manuals. The post covers a variety of areas, but one struck me as especially relevant for Product Managers–

“I worked for two large corporations in the 1970’s and 80’s. They were both established leaders in their field. Millions of dollars were spent in meetings, studies, Return on Investment(ROI) analysis and more studies, usually resulting in the decision not to go forward. Neither company exists today.” -Steve Kaufmann of LingQ

I was in a meeting a few days ago where we were discussing the schedule for the upcoming release of my product. To my knowledge, everyone in the room already knew what the schedule was, but we have an internal wiki that we use to track release dates and that page had TBD in several slots, hence the meeting. What was really driving the meeting was that members of the exec team had different dates in their heads and when this came to light, there was an immediate scramble to get everything reconciled.