Posts Tagged ‘technology’

A Medium post titled Clouseau: A Postmortem has been making its rounds on the internet today. While the title isn’t particularly revealing, the subtitle gives you the gist of the story: “How I vetted and dumped a startup idea in ~20 hours and for under $1000.”

For those who haven’t read the article, here’s a quick summary:

• A product manager from Google went on a vacation in Europe and stayed in some fancy hotels
• Those fancy hotels did a poor job of providing rooms dark enough to sleep in
• The product manager spent time and money investigating a business plan around measuring light levels in hotel rooms
• This data would be offered as a service and would be a “natural monopoly” in the industry
• Two light meters were purchased and a logo was commissioned for the project
• This plan failed because hotels don’t let people barge into their rooms to measure light levels without reserving the room, which was cost-prohibitive

What this unintentionally illustrates is classic “product manager thinking:” marching ahead with a pre-conceived solution set in mind despite having given little or no thought to the problem space as a whole. Instead, they limit themselves to areas where they have existing domain knowledge and try to build a solution around that. In this case, that involved coming up with a data-driven approach built around a technological solution.

But just because someone has a pre-existing toolkit for solving problems doesn’t mean that toolkit is always going to be the best method — or even an adequate method — to solve every problem. As the saying goes, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

As a software engineer I’ve witnessed this type of thinking in every product manager I’ve ever encountered. No matter what the problem, somehow software was going to be the answer, because that’s what they had to work with. Is the toilet broken? Great! Since the problem is broken toilets, we’ll build an app that lets you hire a plumber. Problem solved… sort of.

So I don’t mean to single out this particular product manager when I point out that his “rapid prototype” was an unnecessary waste of time. If anything that’s the industry norm.

Instead, if he’d only taken a couple minutes to ask someone who travels frequently — or even someone who lives in a neighborhood with a lot of nightlife — he’d know that this was a solved problem. In fact, it was solved so long ago that the solution is offered in thousands of stores from dozens of different companies:

Yup. A humble sleep mask will block out light. And for good measure, buy a couple sets of earplugs. Believe me, if you travel a lot, you’re going to wind up in some loud, bright hotel rooms where you’ll need both.

The message I want to leave you with is to avoid this pitfall. Yes, sometimes gathering data and offering it as a service is a sensible solution to a problem. Or maybe some other type of technology. But unless you’ve fully explored the alternatives, don’t limit yourself with a hammer/nail mentality.