Product Management, Passion & Design
By accompa on Mar 14, 2008 in Design, Product Management
Last week, Paul Young at the Product Beautiful blog made an excellent post titled “Is Product Management Incompatible with Passion?“. His post is based on a recent Fortune magazine article titled “The Trouble with Steve Jobs“, and Paul asks the question:
“Is Product Management incompatible with creating products that inspire passion? Product Management’s function is to discover market needs and fulfill those needs with products. But people don’t buy on need alone; they also buy on emotion and other soft factors.”
This is a very thought-provoking topic, and had several insightful comments - make sure to check out Paul’s post. Here are our thoughts on it.
As Paul says above, one of the key roles that Product Management plays in a company is to discover market needs, and meet those needs with products.
iPod - a Quick Case Study
Let us pick a recent, uber-successful Apple product as an example - the iPod. It turns out that in the market the iPod plays in (i.e. personal music players) - one of the market needs is sexy design & ease of use.
I remember the MP3 player I had before the iPod hit the market - it was really ugly and damn hard to use. Apple ( aka Steve Jobs?! 
) identified this unmet market need and fulfilled it admirably with iPod & iTunes.
As Paul wondered in his article, we are not sure how much involvement Apple’s Product Management team had in uncovering/meeting that need - but we think whoever did that job (Steve Jobs?) played the role of Product Management very, very successfully.
In Summary:
We think that Product Management & products that inspire passion are not at all incompatible. As a matter of fact, we believe it is Product Management’s responsibility to identify all the market needs - including “passion-inspiring” features, where applicable. And then work with others - Design team, Engineering team, seemingly overbearing execs, et al - to bring the product that meets (exceeds?) those needs to market. And help make the product successful!
What do you think? Let us know your comments.
1. Jon S | Mar 14, 2008 | Reply
Hi guys,
Got your email this morning announcing your blog.
This looks to be promising, I hope it turns out as useful & good quality as your product. By the way, love the “Personalized Defaults” feature in the latest release, makes it much faster to add requirements, keep it up!
- Jon