Want to Fail in Product Management? Make Sure to Apply These Lessons Learned

During the course of a year, I was assigned a huge responsibility in an area where I was unfamiliar with and with a role I was just starting to learn about. Actually, what I really meant to say was: “holy crap! You scared me out of my wits”! simply because it was a new ordeal to my known world and I was silly enough to give it the power to freak me out when I should have just encounter it with a more positive approach. Don’t get me wrong, I was excited for the challenge and had all the attitude to make the best out of it superficially speaking but inside I was scared. The new assignment was to lead the new product of the company, create the action plan, generate product road-map, align needs and expectations with respective stakeholders, evaluation plans for allocated team, deliver MVP with planned releases and create Beta strategy approach.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Expert Judgement: During the focus group sessions on getting to know the market we were aiming for, we required of professional help in the sense of marketing and product development. Considering that we were new in such world and in a complex industry, we made assumptions in areas where we required expert judgement to avoid the level of uncertainty.

Business Model: The race started and we ran fast without our map, in other words we lacked a well-established business model prior to starting with the development process. The lack of such left the allocated team with several assumptions and doubts regarding expectations and needs of the product.

Marketing Strategy: Due to the fact of having a clear construction of a business model, there was very little north aimed towards the marketing of the product as far as generating an echo within the industry and respective stakeholders. Which meant that promoting the brand was not contemplated in any initial planning phases.

Hardship: While the focus group sessions helped see and hear the pains from the customer’s every day operation, we lacked to fully understand such needs in a more personal level and with a more momentum in place in order to perceive a more concrete idea of the different situations. There was a lagging in place during the scheduling of the sessions which lead to lowering performance and motivation of reaching the goals.

Back Review- Customer Side-Respective stakeholders: There was a realization during the implementation process that was not considered for which the demonstrations and Sprint reviews done without contemplating the key stakeholders such as Product Owner, potential Beta users, Customers and third parties.

Added Value: The added value and vision of the product were not entirely clear and during the implementation process there were deviations from the main objective due to change of key stakeholders and the amount of outside members of the company transferring interpretations/perceptions to the project team.

• Questions filled with uncertainty: Why is this product being created? Who do we want to impact? What is the solution? What is the problem in need? What are the expectations to come of this delivery? What will it take to create, execute and deliver the product with the expected quality based on expectations? What is the added value? Is this worth doing ( Feasibility, viability and probability) ?

The grass is not always greener on the other side: The product road-map was established based on internal stakeholder’s point of views, making assumptions about an industry not familiar to us, and mostly looking for the best functionality approach which meant that the boat was being driven by technical stakeholders thus leaving the business crew behind. Having said that the strategies implemented were founded on technical expertise and not from a business perspective.

You are capable of more than you know. Choose a goal that seems right for you and strive to be the best, however hard the path. Aim high. Behave honorably. Prepare to be alone at times, and to endure failure. Persist! The world needs all you can give.