As Product Manager on Kindling, I spend much of my week fielding feature requests and keeping track of enhancements we want to make to to the product. There are no shortage of these. Between customer feedback (thanks, by the way!) keeping an eye on our competition and exploring relationships with design partners, we could ride out our roadmap for the next ten years.
No one likes a conglomerate product. (via njorthr)
This isn’t a problem for Kindling, the product, but it occurred to me this morning that this is a problem for me, the product manager.
After a great meeting reviewing our next six months with a colleague, I came back to my desk and thought “wow, what’s going to be next?” I allowed myself to imagine a bit into the future and then I slammed the door on that. “The LAST thing we need are more ideas!” I thought. Because to me, the person who serves as the traffic cop, ideas for Kindling overwhelm me on an everyday basis!
I bet a lot of people managing products feel similarly out there. There can be so many dreamers for your product that you spend your time giving priority to other people’s visions and put yours by the wayside.
On one hand, you need this role on every team, just like you need someone in every family who can put the brakes on spending every last dime in the savings account. Someone has to protect the long-term future of the project (be it family or product) while the rest of the crew bubbles with innovation.
But on the other hand, I think the exercise of dreaming big, giant dreams for a product is necessary for short- and long-term motivation. Regardless of your role, you can give yourself five minutes to ignore the endless line of requests and imagine the next generation of what you’re building. More than anything, you must remember that your product is more than a globby mess of features requested from the highest bidder.
So ignore requests for pagination and a fancier button. Think bigger. Who is your product in the world? Who loves it? Who needs it? And what will their love and needs require two, three, five years from now?
Those are the ideas that thrive in Kindling, the ideas that invite discussion and create voting frenzies. The big ideas. The ones that need you to think of them early on, that require a little time in your schedule to dream them up.
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