BlogSat

One of my favorite frameworks to think about building and shipping products is Larry Keeley 's Desirability-Viability-Capability model. Most great products get these three aspects right... or right enough; inevitably finding the balance and making the right trade-offs is part of the journey. In the book I've linked above, Alan Cooper suggests the way to find that balance is to have 3 different people responsible for each aspect. He suggests the Engineering Lead worries about Capability ( i.e. what's possible and how to do it) , a UX Lead focus on Desirability (i.e. what makes your users love the Product) and a Business/Product person own Viability (i.e. why will this work and how to get it there.) He makes the case that this is necessary not only because these are different skills that require specific training and instincts, but also because of the tension between them and focus each requires. I'm curious what people think though, and how they approach this. Often ...

Painters and sculptors sign their art. Writers have their names on the jacket of their books. Journalists get bylines. Their name is forever tied to the what they worked on. Some of this is the narcism that we all have and the desire to mark ownership we all crave, but I remember reading that it started as a way to take responsibility. You put your name on what you worked on so that people would know that it was your brilliance, and your errors and faults, that were on display. A question that I'm now teaching myself to ask and wish more people shipping software would ask themselves is "Would I ship it if it had my name on it?" Not just my company's or my products, but mine. Releasing products, especially in a fast-moving industry and in a launch-and-iterate culture is often about what you leave out, and what you will get to later. You have a vision to begin with or at least a plan, but then as deadlines approach or other evil things happen, you decide what features...

Found and read this great document from Ben Horowitz and David Weiden, which was apparently written up almost 15 years ago. There's a lot of goodness in here, so I'm not even going to try to summarize it. The Bad PM parts are as instructive as a the Good PM parts. I just put in a reminder to my calendar to re-read this from time to time. :) Good Product Manager Bad Product Manager Kv View more documents from daksh sharma .