It puzzles me why this seem to happen so rarely.

In interaction design they create user goals, and let the goals define the features. With this approach they often find that fewer features solves the goals better.

It buffels me that Product managers and other managers underestimate interaction design. They make it so much easier to deside witch features to ignore.

Why should the PM tell 58 sales engineers to sod off every week, when an interaction designer can show them why their features are irrelevant in the big picture?

-Frank Jensen, Developer

- Dr. Jim Anderson
The Accidental PM Blog
“Home Of The Billion Dollar Product Manager”

However, as PM’s we (at least I) have about 60 CSE’s world wide, and each one of them has a different opinion on what the Product needs to be (and it is usually what caused them to lose their last order). Thus we are blessed with the wisdom of 60 opinions on what is right, and guess how many of them can be right enough to make it into the product.

I live in a hardware world, where it takes a fairly long time to alter course (you have to design the changes, then you have to model the impact (usually a FEA modelling exercise), you have to prototype it, you have to check the actual performance (is it on par with the MRD, or do we need to iterate), then we have to ensure that our change doesn’t f*ck up any other aspect of performance (and believe me, it is VERY common for an innocuous change to destroy a finely tuned system), and then we commit to the main product the change. Oh, and by the way, a truck load of SW is usually required to achieve some of this.

Then you go to the annual sale meeting and tell the CSE’s what is not available, and you get 1 or 2 people cheering, and 58 throwing rotten fruit, since their pet requests got dropped below the cut line.

The value that falls on me and my team is to make sure that our limited resources are used to address the biggest business problem our customer base has. We are pretty successful, but the enhancements are usually not platform changes that the CSE’s like to see.

Of course, as a final note, I am displeased that my GM is about to drive e complete platform evolution for a single customer, that will have no applicability beyond this one (small) customer, and will destroy all our other development efforts for the entire year, but hey, we need the $1M in bookings for it…

If I had a frickin nickel for every time an SE came to me for help but without a customer problem to solve, I’d own…well…. something I don’t have yet. Thus making me (or my team) in the business of problem diagnosis. Isn’t that an SE responsibility?

Seriously, life is easy when the problem statement is clear. Either the product solves it or it doesn’t. Any competent product manager can make the connection between a product and his/her product’s ability to solve it.

I suspect there’s an ever broader issue at hand. And that is, when a customer appears willing to spend money, the sales force’s product better be the one that’s bought. Without regard for the fit of problem-to-your-solution. Do economic times like these make vendors more desperate and less disciplined in this regard? Is there any point in resisting it as product managers?