Inside-out Products: A Trap for Product Manager

Let’s imagine a mid-size IT company. It was founded around a decade ago by group of smart engineers who are probably still around as executives.

Back in early days, the company built a highly successful and innovative product. The product allowed quickly expand worldwide, made company profitable and created foundation of today’s success.

A decade later, the company is not a start up any longer. Some processes are around, engineering is busy adding new features, marketing is creating nice slide decks and sales are sweating to deliver their quotas.

Everything looks great. But market became more competitive, customers are more demanding today than a year before and YoY growth is not that impressive as it used to be. The company wants continue to grow and it needs new products in portfolio that will rock the market.

What is inside-out product?

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Prioritize Customer’s Requests Efficiently – Part 3: Decisions

In the previous parts we have done the heavy lifting – got clarity and came to conclusions. In the third and last part we are going to discuss practical prioritization mechanisms and tools. We will also touch sensitive topic how to communicate changes in priorities.

Let’s assume that you have list of clear customers’ requests. You can articulate why they are important and what is the actual need behind the request. They may look like equally important, but they are not. When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.

We need to introduce additional dimension(s) and rank items from our list according them. It is not a rocket science and plenty of tools are available for that. So, here we will touch only tiny percentage of them.

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Book Review: The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

I have started new job in September 2020 – after 6 months in a “working-from-home” mode. Some of the questions I was asking myself after signing new contract were:

“Will I be able to connect with my new peers, my manager and feel myself part of the team?”

“How can I connect with company’s culture without meeting people physically?”

These questions are extremely relevant in the modern society. We are becoming more and more lonely, while becoming more and more digitally connected. Paradox. Check out this 30 year vision from SoftBank for more insights on that. It was created in 2010 and their predictions are pretty accurate so far.

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