Like all product managers who’ve lasted more than a year or two, the Cranky Product Manager has learned a few key phrases that keep her out of trouble. We all do it. Don’t kid yourself. “Weasel words,” some call them. The Cranky PM calls it “PM-Obfusco-Speech.” And here’s a “secret decoder ring” to let you translate it.
| WHAT WE SAY | WHAT WE MEAN |
| You should file a customer commitment. | Your feature request is stupid. Please stop pestering me and go away. |
| It’s on the long-term roadmap. | While not stupid, your feature request is such low priority that it’s not slated for a release and won’t happen within the next three years. |
| OK, Mr. Customer, I can see why you want that feature. We’ll need to take a look at how it fits into our product strategy and roadmap, and it’s good to know how important it is to you. | Notice that I did NOT say we’d do this feature. We might NEVER do it. But I want you to feel like Product Management listens to you. |
| It’s currently planned for Release X.XX. | Yeah, everyone is saying this is going to be in Release X.XX, but I won’t believe it until it actually ships. |
| Sounds like you are using the product to solve some really interesting problems. I’d like to learn more about your use cases. | No one else uses this product this way, it is not designed for your purpose, and we don’t do any testing for your type of use. Yikes! |
| This product will help you increase your ROI and decrease your TCO. | I have no freaking clue what the REAL business benefits of my product are, and I’m too lazy to figure it out. |
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I particularly like the last one “This product will help you increase your ROI and decrease your TCO”. Think that applies to 99% of the software out there, great way to NOT differentiate yourself. The other 1% is social media software, where they say “This product will help you spend (waste) all your time following trends, but hey, atleast it’s free. That’s a great ROI!” :) (I kid of course about things like twitter, if used correctly it’s a great resource.)
The last one can more generically be “Ignore me. I’m a robot/Gartner consultant.”
Here’s one more:
What we say: “I was not aware of this bug but will take it back to our development team so we can fully analyze it and come up with a fix”
What we mean: “Yes, you are the hundredth person to bring this up within the past 5 days and we have no freakin clue how to fix it”
And, how about this one:
What we say: “Yes, you are not the only one to request this feature and we have already made plans to add it to our roadmap”
What we mean: “You are no genius, other people have already asked for it. What took you so long to figure it out this is missing?”
Nice post!
This is hilarious. I lived the ‘it’s planned for xx.x release’ scenario – it’s so pitiful that major corporations can’t commit features so customers can plan. Or rather – it’s so crazy that customers think their suppliers should be able to plan ahead!
Classic, and the adders are great too.
The third one down is the best. I used to live that in my life in Hardware. People always thought that for a bargain price, we could build them one off’s that would make Raytheon’s budget masters puke. Riiiiiggghhhhttttt.
Oooh, like your additions, Daniel! Especially the first one – been there, done that!
And don’t forget the internal stuff that we tell Engineering:
What we say: “This is good engineering and it’ll make it all consistent. Let me take this to our top clients and see if it would have a nagative impact on their systems”
What we mean: “This is not a feature the clients will benefit from but let me ask them anyway if this would break legacy. I will get back to you in 2 years”
Mustafa, if we take the route of the “internal stuff” we say we will end up with an endless list… a couple of the typical ones are:
What we tell sales: “This new release has greatly improved our ability to do X, Y, and Z. It also brings a new ABC feature which we’re the only ones in the market that can offer.”
What we mean: “The new release is a minor improvement over the previous one and I’m not wasting my time explaining something that you cannot technically understand. Just lower the price as you always do and hope the customer doesn’t ask tough questions”.
Or the classic:
What we say to the CEO: “The new release was finally shipped yesterday, which is only a minor delay. The development team really did a great job at tackling some unforeseen bugs and was able to wrap it up pretty quickly.”
What we mean: “This project was completely underestimated and we’re lucky it was released so soon. Of course, we had to skip QA and so now we should pray for it not to blow up unexpectedly.”
:)
Great post!
I posted them on our board for Product Managers and none of them found it funny, they claimed that it was product marketers who said that. My favourite one I use is the one:
We don’t have that feature but we have a lot of customers that have developed work arrounds for that problem….
actually:
Everyone one else has identified the problem and solved it,… everyone but us. Now we will never get anyone to pay for the development.