Four Questions
Early in her great book “The Product Manager’s Handbook,” Linda Gorchels notes that there are four things every product manager must know about his or her product:
- What does it do?
- What is it?
- What is the market?
- What does it mean to the market?
Many times, clients come to me raring to get designing, but without answers to one or more of these. A technology-driven company may know how a device will work, but not exactly who they’re selling to. Or they may know who they want to sell to, but not what the product ought to do. Without having clear answers on each of these points, designers are in a tough spot: create something compelling without knowing what “compelling” really means.
Years ago, we realized that most clients were giving us incomplete project briefs: some of these questions didn’t have complete answers. We started trying to convince clients to “take a step back” and better understand why they were doing what they were doing; in effect, we helped them answer the questions, reassess the product they were asking us to build, and then moving ahead with a clearer picture. These days, nearly every project we take on has a “step back” phase. Even if clients are unwilling to pay to step too far back (“We already did a lot of research.”), we sneak some in. We have to do it, to get the confidence we need that the work we do will be successful.
My frustration is this: if it’s on page 2 of the “Handbook,” why do so many marketing types fail to recognize the importance of answering these questions before actually building anything?
Partly, I think it’s because the marketing folks I meet (and there are many of them – we worked with more than 100 different clients on 250 projects last year) come from one of a few different paths. They come from sales, or from engineering, or business school. Depending on which path, a marketeer will have a clear understanding of Brand, or channel, or technology – the know-how to answer one or two of the questions, but without exposure to the others.
Maybe, over time, with the help of people like Gorchels, “product management” will have a rigorous definition, and accredited training process, and a common understanding of what it means to define a product. Until then, it will up to designers to take up the slack and answer the unanswered questions.
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I found your site on google blog search and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. Just added your RSS feed to my feed reader. Look forward to reading more from you.
- Sue.
Seems to me this could form the beginning of a consultant-oriented question list. Stuff to ask in the first few conversations, and to keep asking to understand where the gaps are.
(maybe I’m just reiterating what you’re saying…if they should be able to answer it, we should be asking it…)
Hi Steve!
Of course you’re right, and we ask those questions in several different ways. But for many clients, they fall into a weird zone. They’re not all “marketing” questions as they understand product management; they’re not all “design” questions as they understand design.
I think that “design thinking,” if people are still using that term, is simply having internally-consistent answers to those questions. If you can answer them all meaningfully, you’re usually way ahead of your competition.