I recently read an excellent book - “Making Ideas Happen” by Scott Belsky.

The book has a lot of great ideas that are very beneficial to those of us in product management - whether you’re a VP/Director of product management, or a product manager.

The book covers the general topic of “How to make ideas happen” and innovation. In this post, I’d like to share with you a really cool equation in the book - it’s directly applicable to product managers…

How to Make Products (or Features) Happen - *THE* Equation

Here’s the equation from page 14 of the book (get your copy here) that I’ve adapted for product managers:

Making Products/Features Happen = The Idea + Organization and Execution + Forces of Community + Leadership Capability

Wondering what each of the factors in the equation mean? Here’s a brief summary.

• The Idea: This is easy. Any product/feature starts with an idea. A product manager must have an idea before he/she can make it into a product or feature.
• Organization and Execution: Scott emphasizes the importance of having an organization (group of people) and being good at execution as key factors in turning ideas into outcomes. For PMs, this means: a) the ability to effectively leverage the resources of your company, and b) focusing on execution. The importance of execution is repeated throughout the book - I agree 100%.
• Forces of Community: For PMs, this means getting feedback from customers as well as internal teams such as Sales and Support on their idea for the product/feature - and iterating to improve it, before getting started with the execution.
• Leadership Capability: As we know, a big part of being a product manager is leading effectively without authority. PMs who are good at leading the project team will have more success at turning ideas into products/features consistently.

I will expand on these items further in a future post - with a list of actionable, practical tips. Until then, I wish you successful products!

What are your thoughts on this equation? How will you improve it? Chime in here…