(2016-09-30) Cagan Behind Every Great Product

Martin Cagan: Behind Every Great Product | Silicon Valley Product Group

my intention here is to show you great examples of this third way of working

I want to instead introduce you to real people.

MS-WORD FOR MAC – Martina Lauchengco

1993

single code base

literally two minutes to startup

Martina Lauchengco, a young product manager recently out of Stanford

The team ended up focusing hard on performance, and taking advantage of what the Mac could do.

The result was that in a couple of months, they produced a 6.1 release that was sent to every registered user with an apology letter – signed by Martina – along with a discount coupon for future purchases.

NETFLIX – Kate Arnold

she’s been my partner at SVPG for over a decade

1999

They were essentially providing the same general pay-per-rental experience that Blockbuster provided

One of many tests they tried was to move to a subscription service

The bad news is that the team created some real problems for themselves

They knew they needed to somehow get customers to want a blend of expensive and less expensive titles. Necessity being the mother of invention, this is where the queue, the ratings system, and the recommendation engine all came from.

Kate is now a product leader at Shutterstock in New York City.

GOOGLE ADWORDS – Jane Manning

2000

encountered some pretty strong resistance from both the ad sales team, and the engineering team.

Sales was nervous that this idea of a self-service advertising platform would diminish the value of what the sales team was trying to sell.

The product solution they ended up with placed the AdWords-generated ads to the side of the search results, so they wouldn’t be confused with the salesperson-sold ads which were displayed on the top of the results.

instead of determining placement based solely on the price paid, they would use a formula that multiplied the price paid per impression with the ad’s performance (click-through-rate) to determine placement

BBC MOBILE – Alex Pressland

2003

Alex Pressland, had just finished leading a product effort that enabled the BBC to be one of the first media companies in the world to syndicate content

One such early possibility she found were city center venues that had these large electronic billboard screens that were capable of video

Alex proposed a series of experiments

This work ended up fueling a dramatic shift at the BBC from broadcast content to content distribution, and this work dramatically impacted reach, and soon became the basis for BBC’s Mobile efforts

APPLE ITUNES – Camille Hearst

Moving beyond early adopters into mass market involved many different efforts, some product, some marketing, and some a blend of the two

2008

complemented the American Idol experience, yet also injected iTunes as a key component of fan’s life

ADOBE CREATIVE CLOUD – Lea Hickman

2011

move from the old desktop-centric, annual upgrade model, to a subscription-based model supporting all the devices designers were now using – including tablets and mobile in all their many form factors.

suite of integration applications – 15 major ones and many smaller utilities

compelling prototypes

The big points I hope you take away from this are:

1) Product Management is absolutely distinct from the other disciplines

unlike the CEO, nobody reports to the product manager.

2) Like a CEO, the Product Manager must deeply understand all aspects of the business

3) the winning solutions didn’t come from users or sales; rather great products require an intense collaboration with design and engineering to solve real problems for our users and customers, in ways that meet the needs of your business. In each of these examples, the users had no idea the solution they fell in love with was actually possible.

4) Like a successful CEO, the successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative and persistent

5) Finally, I hope you can see that true leadership is a big part of what separates the great product people from the merely good ones.

Bill's Lesson 6: none of these people are famous, rich, or even working for a hot company.