Comments on: Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?

By: Product Beautiful » Blog Archive » Does Passion Matter?

Product Beautiful » Blog Archive » Does Passion Matter? — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:22:08 +0000

[...] last post on Is Product Management Compatible with Passion? kicked up some great comments from the PM blog community. Bob Corrigan at ack/nak and I had a [...]

By: spatially relevant » Blog Archive » March 31st - Relevant Links

spatially relevant » Blog Archive » March 31st - Relevant Links — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:05:57 +0000

[...] Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion? – I thought PM was passion with a little bit of P&L thrown in [...]

By: Jon Gatrell

Jon Gatrell — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:09:03 +0000

usability, design and selecting features are part of PM – right? Good PMs balance the organization, just remember the newton from apple included a thermometer which sat right next to the processor, bad design, bad feature – bad PM.

By: bob corrigan

bob corrigan — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:11:03 +0000

Paul, thanks for our chat, you helped me to really organize my thoughts around this very, very challenging post.

http://acknak.blogspot.com/2008/03/chat-is-product-management-incompatible.html

By: Raj P

Raj P — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:57:03 +0000

Hi Paul, Great post & very thought-provoking! I found the comments very insightful as well. My thoughts on this topic lean towards Richard's comments above. I wrote a detailed post on our new blog Practical Product Management on this topic.

By: Product Management, Passion & Design : Practical Product Management

Product Management, Passion & Design : Practical Product Management — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:34:09 +0000

[...] week, Paul Young at the Product Beautiful blog made an excellent post titled “Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?“. His post is based on a recent Fortune magazine article titled “The Trouble with Steve [...]

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:39:26 +0000

This has been a great conversation, and thanks to everyone who has replied. As my thinking has evolved on this topic since writing it, my follow on will be: does passion matter? There are a lot of very profitable products out there that people are not passionate about. I think that we would all love to manage a product that inspires passion because it would be fun, but our job as PM’s isn’t to manage “fun” products…it’s to manage products that are profitable.

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:19:37 +0000

Really interesting post! Here’s my take on it

In certain cases product management can specify that a product should have a certain design. If we identify a market niche that requires beautiful design over complete functionality, for example, then this requirement should come from Product Management.

Richard

By: Rob Grady

Rob Grady — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:49:39 +0000

Great post and very thought provoking. Product management has a significant role in defining, supporting and sometimes defending a product. For better (or worse sometimes) almost every organization has a visionary or two that can drive passion around the product. I’ve worked with good (and not so good) visionaries. Great products last the test of time and generally beyond the visionary’s endurance. I think you need passion to keep a product successful over the long-term.

Rob Grady

By: Jeff Lash

Jeff Lash — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:32:37 +0000

Excellent post and great comments by Steve. When you say

The PM process of �listen to market, feed requirements to development, output product� is designed to be safe and create exactly what the market needs.

I think there are two things to keep in mind:

“Needs” shouldn’t be taken too literally. After food, clothing, and shelter, there’s not much people really “need.” No one “needs” an MP3 player, a motorcycle, a computer, etc. Maybe it’s better to think about “unmet needs” as problems, frustrations, sub-optimal experiences, convoluted processes, unnecessary complexities, and the like.
“The market” should be thought of in a rather broad fashion. Take the Wii for example — there were several different game consoles aimed at hard-core gamers and none focused on people who currently don’t play games. “The market” needed something like the Wii to fill that gap. Essentially, there was an unmet opportunity that was waiting to be filled. With the iPod as well, there were other MP3 players, though none could allow someone seamlessly and easily manage and transfer their entire music collection like the iPod.

Finding the “market need” creates a great product — good design on top of that creates a legendary product. A bad product concept that is well-designed is almost always a flop; a good product concept that is badly-designed may be marginally successful, though it will never inspire passion among users and consumers. You need the combination of a good idea that fills a market need — the Wii, the iPod, Good Grips utensils, eBay — and the beautiful design on top of it to bring out the passion.

Jeff
My blog: How To Be A Good Product Manager