{"id":4361,"date":"2016-07-27T03:52:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-27T03:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/?p=4361"},"modified":"2023-07-13T07:56:30","modified_gmt":"2023-07-13T07:56:30","slug":"how-not-to-think-like-a-product-manager","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/technology\/how-not-to-think-like-a-product-manager\/","title":{"rendered":"How (not) to think like a product manager"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A Medium post titled <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@dweekly\/clouseau-a-postmortem-ed6192f32ae3\">Clouseau: A Postmortem<\/a> has been making its rounds on the internet today. While the title isn&#8217;t particularly revealing, the subtitle gives you the gist of the story: &#8220;How I vetted and dumped a startup idea in ~20 hours and for under $1000.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For those who haven&#8217;t read the article, here&#8217;s a quick summary:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>A product manager from Google went on a vacation in Europe and stayed in some fancy hotels<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Those fancy hotels did a poor job of providing rooms dark enough to sleep in<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The product manager spent time and money investigating a business plan around measuring light levels in hotel rooms<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This data would be offered as a service and would be a &#8220;natural monopoly&#8221; in the industry<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Two light meters were purchased and a logo was commissioned for the project<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>This plan failed because hotels don&#8217;t let people barge into their rooms to measure light levels without reserving the room, which was cost-prohibitive<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What this unintentionally illustrates is classic &#8220;product manager thinking:&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But just because someone has a pre-existing toolkit for solving problems doesn&#8217;t mean that toolkit is always going to be the best method &#8212; or even an <em>adequate<\/em> method &#8212; to solve every problem. As the saying goes, to the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a software engineer I&#8217;ve witnessed this type of thinking in every product manager I&#8217;ve ever encountered. No matter what the problem, somehow software was going to be the answer, because that&#8217;s what they had to work with. Is the toilet broken? Great! Since the problem is broken toilets, we&#8217;ll build an app that lets you hire a plumber. Problem solved&#8230; sort of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I don&#8217;t mean to single out this particular product manager when I point out that his &#8220;rapid prototype&#8221; was an unnecessary waste of time. If anything that&#8217;s the industry norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Instead, if he&#8217;d only taken a couple minutes to ask someone who travels frequently &#8212; or even someone who lives in a neighborhood with a lot of nightlife &#8212; he&#8217;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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"238\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sleep-mask-300x238.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-4362\" title=\"Sleep mask and earplugs\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sleep-mask-300x238.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sleep-mask.jpg 1000w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;re going to wind up in some loud, bright hotel rooms where you&#8217;ll need both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;ve fully explored the alternatives, don&#8217;t limit yourself with a hammer\/nail mentality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Medium post titled Clouseau: A Postmortem has been making its rounds on the internet today. While the title isn&#8217;t particularly revealing, the subtitle gives [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","slim_seo":{"title":"How (not) to think like a product manager - MrEricSir.com","description":"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 y"},"autoblue_enabled":true,"autoblue_custom_message":"","autoblue_shares":[],"autoblue_post_url":"","autoblue_publish_document":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1166,1164,1165,674],"class_list":["post-4361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-hotels","tag-product-manager","tag-sleep","tag-technology-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4361"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9984,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4361\/revisions\/9984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mrericsir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}