What is the one business article or interview that all Product Managers should read?

For me, it has to be "The Institutional Yes", which is an interview with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, published by the Harvard Business Review in October 2007. I admit that much of my own thoughts on product strategy were formed by reading this interview.

It covers a lot of things, but a few in particular:

• Bezos encouraged his executives to develop a long-term strategy that was based on whatwouldn't change in the future. Almost everyone gets this wrong. Consider for yourself, what it is about your customers' needs that you can count on being the same year after year? For Amazon, it was that customers want wide selection, low prices, and fast & reliable delivery.
• Bezos made decisions that would have seemed heretical at the time, such as showing side-by-side identical yet lower-cost buying options for Amazon's own merchandise. He was willing to challenge the status quo and place big bets that external customers were more important than internal stakeholders. He couldn't have been more right - especially in a large organization. Never allow the organizational structure of your company dictate what your development focus should be.
• Bezos said "Eventually we have to choose just a couple of things...and make bets." And they made big bets at Amazon: expansion outside of books, outside or media, supporting third party sellers, taking on their fulfillment, building the Kindle, and creating a developer-facing business. What are your long-term bets and are you betting big enough to ensure that their potential will be realized?

These are lessons that every Product Manager could stand to learn from. But, the reason this interview had so much of an affect on me is because I found myself on the losing end (with close to the opposite strategy) while at eBay from 2001-2005. eBay did exceedingly well in that time, and yet was getting its ass kicked. The success fueled by new user regsitration masked the underlying reality that Amazon was stripping away eBay's higest-value buyers with a more convenient shopping experience, and this was finally exposed in later quarters when eBay's stock declined by over 50% (and that was before the stock market crash in '08). (If interested, you can read more on this in an interview with me conducted by my friend and former eBay colleague, Rob Go.)

I always wanted to know what the winning consumer product strategy looked like from the top down. If you want to know, too, you should read "The Insitutional Yes".

Comments

[Dan Callahan]

While there are many good articles on Product Management, here's my input:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html#axzz1lkG9tRqb
It's Guy Kawasaki's "10-20-30 Rule" on PowerPoint. Guy's article is written for those pitching to investors, but the principles apply equally well to Product Managers, who often find themselves pitching to internal or external audiences.

Dan

[Ben Foster]

Dan-O, thanks for the insightful comment and pointing me to Guy's 10/20/30 rule. I hadn't read it previously, but am glad to have done so now.

I have to admit, given that this is the article you chose to reference, I'm surprised you bother reading my lengthy blog posts (or maybe you're trying to tell me something...).

I think he makes a good point about font size, because it forces you to be able to TALK about your idea whose headline is on the projector screen rather than READ it.

The other thing that was implicit in the article was that each slide should be about one thing, and that you can tell a complete story of a company in ten slides.

If you can reduce a company down to ten slides, you can certainly do it for a product within a company, as well. My only hesitation about applying it to Product Management within a company would be that the audience can be quite different than VCs. They are expecting more out of PowerPoint than what it was intended to be used for - for pitches. They want to see every detail for fear that the concept is half-baked.

What's your advice on how Product Managers should do to make their audience like VCs, so that they're willing to hear a story that's only 10 slides long?

[Burke Culligan]

Ben Horowitz's old paper: "Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager" is timeless... and fairly basic, but is great for PMs early in their careers... less about strategy and more about attitude and execution...

http://benhorowitz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/good-product-manager.pdf

[Elliot]

Ben--That was a great read. I had two good takeaways:
- As you pointed out: "what won't change in 10 years?" or identifying a segment's nontransient needs; and,
- "Whenever we're facing a too-hard problem where we get into an infinite loop and can't decide what to do, we try to convert it into a straightforward problem by saying, 'Well, what's better for the consumer?'" --this sort of thinking led to the marketplace sellers placement on the product page.

Being able to identify people's nontransient needs and understanding what's a better experience for a person is the most important topic that Bezos' doesn't provide much insight into in this interview.

There's a common, but hazardous refrain in Silicon Valley that "Apple doesn't do user research, so neither should we," advocating for inside-out development. Marty Cagan gives short-shrift to the process of identifying "what problem will this product solve," and though he advocates user research and developing honest personas in the way that Bezos or Scott Cook might, there's not a good discussion of that process out there. I'd love to hear you go into this subject sometime.

Cheers!

[simon]

Really like the blog, appreciate the share!

[Malisa Petru]

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