Incremental Product Management

Is it possible to turn a bucket of fertilizer into a rose petal? Yes. It is. However, it requires time and effort. And progress is measured in small increments rather than large leaps. This, in a nutshell, is product management. It’s a process. It’s time consuming and most often measured in minor victories – hopefully steady ones. It’s rarely a home run let alone a consistent string of them. The earlier you realize this, the greater the brain damage you’ll save yourself.

How does one manage a lengthy process of tiny victories in order to achieve great success? Other than exercising a boat load of patience, that is? The key is to make good decisions consistently. While it’s true that you will, through your product management career, make many bad decisions you should continually work to reduce the number of bad decisions and increase the number of good ones you make in both quantity and quality.

While this is a worthy objective, it’s much easier said than done. Consequently, one must bear in mind that over time, the balance of favorable outcomes tips in your favor by making consistently good choices versus making a preponderance of poor choices. Also, for every decision you make, good or bad, you should learn something from it and apply it to the next decision point. This combination helps you replicate good decisions while reducing the poor ones, thus building your success.

By exercising the lessons learned from each decision, your judgment becomes more refined, helping you make better choices going forward. This process is cumulative. The more decisions you make, the more you learn and the deeper your experience becomes. The more of that experience you have at your command, the easier it is to make sound, future choices.

The more positive decisions you make, the greater the probability of successful outcomes and learning which can be built upon further. Truly, striving for consistent, sound decision making for your product or business is very much like compound interest. As Ben Franklin said, there is no greater force in nature than that of compound interest… paraphrased, of course.

The point is this; good decisions repeated improve your odds of success. Poor decisions repeated increase your odds of unemployment.

As a product manager, it’s imperative that you strive to make consistently good decisions by learning from all decisions previously made. Thus, it becomes a process of incremental improvement in your skill set much the same way in which a bucket of fertilizer, under the right conditions, is used to turn a seed into a plant bearing rose petals. It’s all incremental.

As previously stated, product management is slow, it’s incremental, and there are few home runs. But if you understand the basic premise behind the process and work to exercise the fundamentals – consistent good decision making and learning from each decision, then applying those lessons - you’ll see the results you hope for across time. Profitable products, happy customers, satisfied management, and bigger pay checks are yours for the taking – one incremental improvement at a time!