Strong Opinions, Loosely Held
Note: This is the narrative version of a keynote talk for the Lenny & Friends Summit.
Recently I was asked a question that I haven’t been able to get out of my head:
“In light of all that has changed, what are the things that you used to argue were true, that you no longer believe?”
For those that aren’t familiar with my work, I’m not focused on the latest framework or process or tool. Instead, I’m interested in the underlying principles.
The things that form the foundation of strong product work, and that stay true despite constant changes.
And the real test of that is whether the content I wrote 20 years ago, and 10 years ago, is still relevant today.
That said, given the transformative nature of AI, I think it’s very fair to question everything, even principles I’ve long considered sacred, and to try to honestly tackle that question.
Realize that I treat my content as my product, and literally every week I am doing product discovery on my content. So there’s been a lot of learning.
I want to talk about what I consider my most serious mistakes and regrets; the kind of things that I desperately wish I understood earlier in my career.
I decided to draw the line at the publication of the first edition of INSPIRED, published in 2008. I wrote this book after 25 years of learning and practicing the craft of product, at both an individual contributor level and a product leadership level, at some of the leading companies of the time.
So what follows are what I consider the ten biggest things I’ve learned since then, that represent a significant change from what I had publicly argued in my content…
1. Business Viability
There’s no getting around it. I completely understated the importance of business viability.
In fact, in the first edition, the product risks were only value, usability, and feasibility, and viability was buried under feasibility. In the second edition of INSPIRED, published 10 years later, viability did become its own risk, but literally hundreds of thousands of product people heard from me this very one-sided view of the product role.
While business knowledge has always been valuable, today, especially when working on AI products with very challenging viability risks related to costs, monetization, liability, and ethics, it’s increasingly essential knowledge for product people.
I’ve thought a lot about how I could have misunderstood the role in such a fundamental way, and I believe the reason was because nearly all of my career up until then was building developer tools and platforms, which is one of the rare places that you can actually get away with weak business skills, and very limited knowledge of viability.
And if you have a product-inclined engineering lead, which I was, you often don’t even need a product manager.
More generally, I have always been grateful for my engineering training and experience that I brought to the product role. I never believed that was the only path, but I have always believed it unlocked so much, and it still helps me to quickly learn and apply new technologies.
While those are valuable skills, going forward, I think the real superpower is a deep understanding of business viability – especially from a systems thinking perspective.
2. Problem Discovery
I’ve always emphasized that product discovery has elements of problem discovery and solution discovery, and there are good techniques for each, but I simply didn’t understand how strongly people would be drawn to the problem discovery side of the equation, and end up viewing themselves as gatekeepers for determining if they have a problem worth solving, and leave themselves too little time for solution discovery.
Many product people go further down this path and obsess over whether this is “the most important problem” for us to solve – which is actually a fruitless and unanswerable question. All we can know for sure is that this is a real problem that’s worth solving.
Yes, it should be pretty obvious that we need to understand the problem to be solved, who we’re solving that problem for, and what success looks like for the business.
But whether enough people have this problem, and wish it could be solved, is rarely hard, and not where the real work is.
When a product fails, it’s almost always because the solution the team came up with just wasn’t good enough.
You might think a product failed because not enough customers have the problem, but as soon as someone else comes along with a better solution, suddenly it’s embarrassingly clear what the real issue was.
Whatever the reason, so many product people spend way too much time questioning and validating the problem, and then, once they finally end up agreeing, they think their big contribution is to explain the reason this is a problem to the rest of the product team, which leads to the next issue…
3. The Wrong “Why?”
I have published a lot about the importance of understanding the reason why we’re working on some problem. After all, we want teams of missionaries and not mercenaries.
But in truth that’s pretty simple work, and usually fairly obvious. In fact, if you have a product vision and product strategy, then the reason why is already spelled out in detail for all to see. This is not the important “why?”
A much more important “why?” and what I should have emphasized is “why are people using – or not using – our product?”
I try out new products constantly, and after I churn, I’m always amazed by how few of the companies reach out – in any fashion – to understand why I churned.
The reasons why people continue to use our product, or especially the reasons why they leave our product, are among the deepest and most important learnings a product person can have, and often the key to unlocking the real potential of your product.
And yet the vast majority of product teams are not even asking this question.
Another big miss.
4. Humility
Increasingly I realize just how important humility and a truly open mind is to a successful product person – at every level.
What do I really mean by humility? It’s knowing what you can’t know, and admitting what you don’t know.
Instead, the main takeaway from my content for so many people was that I told them they need to be the “CEO of the product.” Not exactly a message of humility.
This means approaching every discovery experiment with an open mind as to how people will actually respond to our ideas, and when you find out you were wrong, you embrace that in the spirit of rapid learning rather than any sort of personal failure.
This also includes approaching executives and stakeholders with a true spirit of collaboration – understanding that you often need to work together to solve hard problems.
This may just sound like a personality trait, but the lack of humility and openness – when you believe you know the answer but you don’t – contributes directly to the root cause of so many failed products, and another one of my biggest regrets…
5. Predictability
One of my biggest mistakes was that I simply didn’t appreciate just how powerful and deeply rooted the desire for predictability was – from both product people and company leaders – and how at odds this is with not just humility, but with innovation and outcomes.
Consider the two big artifacts in the product world: roadmaps – what features we think we need to build and when; and PRDs – what the requirements are for said feature.
Now consider how much of an enabler these artifacts are for thinking we know more than we really do.
I believe that this desire for predictability is at the root of why so many companies continue to focus on output, and also at the root of the lack of trust in those companies.
Predictability has its place, but not at the expense of outcomes or trust.
6. Politics
I tried to ignore the importance of politics, hoping that strong product work would be enough to carry the day. That was naive.
People don’t always recognize politics for what they are. They will talk about stakeholder management, executive briefings, or organizational alignment. But these power structures, social relationships and behaviors are a consequence of limited resources, competing objectives, insecurities and personal ambitions, and are part of the fabric of nearly every company.
Politics is a reality, especially at larger companies, and I’ve since dialed way up my discussions of the underlying dynamics, and how to address them.
Most of my content in the past three years has been either about dealing with politics, or understanding the impact of AI.
But this was a big miss.
7. Product Leadership
My initial work was all focused on product teams, and INSPIRED focused on those teams, with very little on the role of product leaders.
That was an intentional choice, but my mistake was not realizing the consequences of that choice.
The result was that so many companies thought that all they needed to do was set up product teams like I described, and all would be good.
But, as so many people have learned the hard way, empowered product teams don’t require less management, they require better management.
At a minimum this means product vision and especially product strategy – identifying the most important problems to be solved.
We did try to address this gap with the publication of EMPOWERED, but the unintended consequences of not including product leadership in INSPIRED continue to leave product teams and companies with serious gaps in their understanding.
8. Corporate Governance
To be clear, I’m not talking about PMO-style governance, which is essentially governance of process.
I’m talking about corporate governance; the oversight of the company, and how to balance the interests of shareholders, executives, board members, customers and employees.
My mistake was in thinking this was not one of the things a strong product leader needed to spend time on.
One of the most painful lessons learned over the years is how great products don’t necessarily lead to great companies.
Helping a company become very good at creating successful products, only to find that you have helped make that company a target for people with very different motivations, that go on to try to pull the product in a different direction, or make choices that hurt our customers.
I had written about this problem, but I really didn’t think there was much we could do about it. So I viewed these product teams as unfortunate victims.
But if your goal is to build something meaningful, and you have the skills to do that, the last thing you want to see happen is that progress destroyed.
Today I coach product leaders to take a more proactive role in working with the CEO to ensure that the company has a governance structure and corporate culture durable enough to succeed on the product vision.
Eric Ries’s excellent new book Incorruptible tackles this problem head on.
9. Competition
Another big mistake: product is not as genteel as I made it sound in my books.
Even my most recent content emphasizes that product is about “solving problems in ways that customers love, yet work for the business.”
While this is true, this can sound almost academic, and can obscure what it is really like when you’re competing in the open market.
The truth is that it’s not enough to solve the problem; we must solve the problem in a way that is significantly better than the competition.
Especially with AI, there are so many competitors in every space, and those competitors are able to move faster than ever before.
The truth is that for commercial products competing in the open market, product is a full-contact blood sport.
You just don’t get that from reading most of my content, and that can leave product teams unprepared for the trials and tribulations of real competition.
10. Thinking
Fundamentally, good product work is about thinking, and I simply did not appreciate the lengths people would go to in order to avoid thinking.
This usually shows up as a craving for process, frameworks and predictability.
I inadvertently fed that hunger by structuring INSPIRED as “people, process, and product.” Big mistake.
Certainly I’m worried that people will use LLMs as an alternative to thinking, rather than as a thought partner. But in truth this has already happened to many people because of process. Process all too often really is used as a substitute for thinking.
I should have called out thinking, and the necessary foundation of product sense, much more loudly and clearly.
Conclusion
The irony is that even with these mistakes and regrets, I am very bullish about the future of product, and I would argue that the content has never been more relevant or important.
Let me try to explain why I believe that.
The main criticism I have received on my content is that people told me they wish they could work this way, but they had two problems:
- their company is addicted to output, and the predictability of that output
- they worried it’s too hard to develop the skills to work in the product model
Today, thanks in no small part to the new generation of AI tools:
- the futility of focusing on output and predictability has never been more clear
- it is dramatically easier to build-to-learn
As AI has continued to reduce the cost of product delivery, this has only increased the relevance of the product model principles, the importance of product strategy and the craft of product discovery.
You may have come to many of the same conclusions yourself. All I can tell you is that I truly wish I better understood these issues back when I first started publishing.
Special thanks to Chris Jones, Teresa Torres and Shreyas Doshi for their feedback on early drafts of this article.