(2009-03-09) Cagan The Seven Deadly Sins Of Product Planning

Martin Cagan: The Seven Deadly Sins of Product Planning. Product planning is a big topic that many product organizations struggle with. It spans a range of activities including business strategy, product strategy, product roadmaps, portfolio management, opportunity assessments, project planning and tracking, and project oversight (project management).

But in a phrase, product planning is where you decide what projects to invest in.

No matter what product planning process you use, they all depend at some point on separating the good ideas from the bad. (prioritize)

the job of the product manager to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible, and I argue that it doesn¹t make sense to proceed unless you have some evidence that you’ve achieved this.

projects that don¹t demonstrate this likelihood of success should be killed before proceeding to engineering.

What I wanted to discuss in this article are the reasons that projects that should get killed often don’t get killed, and the consequences to the organization of this inaction.

So here are the seven biggest reasons that I see out there for not killing the bad ideas:

1. Inertia – probably the biggest reason that weak projects or bad ideas aren’t cancelled is just because it’s just easier to keep moving forward

2. Denial – for many people it is hard to hear criticism

3. Pride – many people have this perception that if your project is killed then you have failed, and further, that failure is a bad thing

4. Abdication – many leaders of product management think their job is to worry about who gets the cubicle by the window rather than take responsibility for the products the company produces. These managers are abdicating their responsibility as leaders

5. Culture – some corporate cultures believe that it borders on being mean to cancel weak projects.

6. Deadlines – I call this the “feed the beast” problem ­ the engineers are coming available next week and we have to give them something to build so get that spec finished!

7. Hubris – let’s face it, a lot of projects are the pet ideas of some executive that is personally convinced that something is essential. (HiPPO)

I view product discovery and innovation a bit like farming. You want to plant the seeds of a lot of ideas, and you want to nurture these ideas, but if you don’t thin the weak ideas then they sap resources from the good ideas.

The truth is that many organizations out there are doing too many projects, many of which aren’t worth doing, and the result is that the organization is stretched too thin to do a good job with the good ideas.

Ultimately it is the executive staff, starting with the head of product, that is responsible for ensuring that the weak ideas are killed so that the strong ideas can be pursued.

Most product teams have plenty of good ideas, they just have a lot of bad ideas as well and they don¹t know the difference until after they build and launch. It is the job of product discovery to remedy this