I love music and have a lot of great songs and albums I’d happily listen to for years to come. Songs have a powerful place in many peoples’ lives. Sometimes a song is so great, even the artist distances themselves from the feeling of ownership on a song and it becomes implicitly owned by culture at large. The perfection of a great song transcends the originator. E.g. “God Only Knows”, “Here, There, And Everywhere”, or perhaps even“The Last Great American Dynasty”. What great songs have in common with product management is this; at some origin point of history there was nothing. A vision was conceived, and the effort to create it began. We don’t even know if the artist’s vision was actually achieved to their satisfaction. We just know the result.

It is easy to take for granted that amazing products and works of art simply exist. For example, I have no idea how many takes Brian Wilson took before the final recording for God Only Knows was perfected. I only know the final song. For a technology example, I’m certain that people today simply accept that all phones have color and video-oriented screens that do everything from stream music and videos, deliver news, play games, text, and occasionally make phone calls. As consumers we often don’t get to see the creation process before the end result.

Musicians and PMs have this in common. We each start with a blank page and an idea. I’m sure other career paths have this parallel too including artists, architects, authors, and more. The spark of an idea can sometimes come in a moment. Other times it is developed across time and built bit by bit. However you do it, I find the creative quality to create something from nothing to be quite rare. PMs, musicians, and artists must all envision the future before it is made real. The vision comes first, followed by the effort to bring it to life. Making it real can take significant effort. That process can take months or years. I think the follow through to build the vision through politics, funding gaps, skills gaps, attrition, detractors, and sheer perseverance is even more rare. This is where exceptional PMs and artists shine.

LEARNING FROM OTHERS

I’ve always enjoyed the creation story of great works. I enjoy these because they can show an insight into the creators after the great idea, and before they completed it. Rick Rubin has a podcast where he interviews accomplished musicians. He asks them about inspiration, specific songs, mindsets, and how they got to the end result of their work. I’ve enjoyed learning how songs were created including the techniques, the instruments, the recording team, the equipment and more all contributed in unexpected ways. Sometimes a famous song started as a tiny idea, and it’s the work of a team that really created what we enjoy today. These stories are illuminating and inspiring for me. I’m confident Taylor Swift has an amazing team. I’m also confident that she’s the inspiration behind every song idea long before anyone else contributes to its creation.

APPLIED TO SOFTWARE

Software product managers can learn from this. Celebrated technology products also get created in very similar ways. Multiple people and ideas come together to create the final product. Often products you may think of as perfect were certainly not perfect when they were released, but became great later. The iPhone is a great product, but even it didn’t have copy and paste or an app store when it first came out. Those got added later.

Great products also take teams. Software teams have members that span many roles. While learning about the core problems to consider solving they have customers, sales engineers, sales, analysts, news articles, and their own observations. While building products they have engineering, UX, UI, support, QA, system test, and more. While releasing products they have marketing, public relations, press, analyst relations, blogs, videos, demos, trade shows, advertising, etc. In each phase the PM is involved to varying degrees. Sometimes they do a lot. Other times they guide. In large organizations with hundreds of people each role may have dedicated teams. In a startup, most of that might be you alone, or with only one to two others to help you.

Great PMs guide their teams to build the right thing, do it efficiently, and do only as much as it needed to succeed. Sometimes this is done in the face of great resistance but they do what it takes to get it done. E.g. You don’t have funding to get a great idea done? Build a pitch deck and sell it internally to your executives. Or, assemble an informal skunkworks team to build a truly minimal MVP. Perhaps you need to reassess your roadmap and find space for it. Are you willing to bump another feature and make someone unhappy to get a more valuable solution built?

 

Be aware as the final PM owner. What gets shaved off in the bumpy process to GA might never, ever come back.

Great PMs also have endurance. In my career some of the best solutions took over two years to define, get in the queue, get built, get released, and marketed. Some of them took three years. You need endurance to keep up the steady pressure to see it through. If you take your attention off, distraction and internal resistance will erase parts of your solution. Sometimes that is done in the name of compromise or collaboration. Sometimes other teams have ulterior motives and want your developers. Be aware as the final PM owner. What gets shaved off in the bumpy process to GA might never, ever come back. People, leaders, funding, attention, strategy, priorities, etc. can all change. When a big effort takes a couple years, the world you live in will be different in some material manner by the time you are done.

TURNING INSPIRATION INTO PRODUCT

Turning a great idea into a great product requires a team. If you are a PM and you have a great customer idea, you may be the person in front of the blank sheet of paper.

Next you need to determine who is on your team. Unlike Taylor Swift today, you won’t get to choose and hire your hand-picked team of industry veterans and experts however. The engineers, product marketers, UX and UI team members, etc. are already at your company. They will get assigned to your effort by other vertical managers if it gets greenlit. You will need to show a compelling vision, influence, use soft skills, use data, encouragement and more at every level to build your vision together. This is not always easy but as the PM you need to inspire, drive, and support your team to get to your vision.

Try hard to keep as much of your vision which is relevant to your product MVP in scope, but not more. Getting through the process from idea to finish is bumpy and full of product risk. You might get another shot to iterate on your release, but you might not. An amazing team will help you execute the vision the first time through.

ABOUT LUKE

Luke Congdon is a career product manager living and working in Silicon Valley since 2000. His areas of focus include enterprise software, virtualization, and cloud computing. He has built and brought numerous products to market including start-up MVPs and billion-dollar product lines. Luke currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. To contact, connect via luke@lukecongdon.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/lukecongdon/.