Emily Tate’s article on the best ways to prioritize bugs comes at the problem with a Scrum lens, but many of the points are more broadly applicable to product management. I particularly like her assertion that there’s nothing “special” about bugs, and as such they should be prioritized just like any other idea/feature:

As product managers, we should always manage our backlog so that the next most important thing is at the top of the list. Many times, the bug you would work on is less important than other things on your backlog. By working on the lower priority bug, you are deferring the more important work that can help you reach your strategic goals.

The flip side of this is also true: sometimes the next most important thing may be five or six bugs that really need to be fixed before adding yet another feature on top of a fragile platform. If you live in a world of separate queues or say you’ll always devote 20% of the team’s time to bugs, you actually lose the opportunity to say “this week, we are squashing these bugs that have been plaguing us before we do another thing.” In reality, you will likely have a mix of bugs and features in your backlog, but the most important thing is that you prioritize strategically and intentionally, not letting a false constraint determine what the ratio of your backlog looks like.

We all know the old enterprise software joke that “no one ever got fired for buying a Microsoft product”. But one of the important points in Auren Hoffman’s post on how Zoom is beating much larger competitors like Google Hangouts and Slack is that larger companies are not that unpleasantly predictable any more:

One of the biggest trends that is driving Zoom’s success is that companies are forgoing the full stack and buying the best-of-breed. The number of vendors the average company is buying from has increased almost 10x in the last 12 years. Companies are happy to buy from many different places. They are even happy to buy from new start-ups. […]

In fact, it has never been easier to sell to large companies. Large companies are open for business. They want to be sold to. They are sick of having a third-rate solution. They want to use the best product. If you can show them your product is superior, they are excited to buy.

This is an exciting development for product managers, especially if you’re building something in the B2B space at a smaller company. With a really good product it’s becoming so much easier to sell to larger companies without the need for the bureaucratic checklists that used to be an impossible barrier to break through (“Are you ISO 9001 certified?”).

That said, in most cases it’s important not to start there. As Box CEO Aaron Levie points out in this article about Slack’s move into the enterprise:

[Slack] have had a methodical process of continuing to drive strategy up market. They started with individuals and small teams, and then departments and bigger teams, and now broader enterprises. It’s been a very thoughtful strategy.

There are many reasons to start your product growth with smaller teams. One is that it will help you make incremental improvements very quickly. But it’s also really dangerous to end up in a situation where most of your revenue comes from a few large customers. So start small, get better, move into larger markets, and then just keep going…

In The Value of Inconvenient Design Jesse Weaver discusses the role of user friction in design — the things that slow us down from getting a task done — and how the goal is not to remove all friction from our product flows:

The friction of the checkout process provides a check against impulse purchases and overspending. In a world where many people struggle to manage their money, these small barriers can be critical to maintaining financial balance. While the market would dictate that it’s not Amazon’s job to help its customers control their spending, lowering the barrier to impulse purchases could have a net negative effect on the value people get from Amazon’s service. The Dash button, for example, eliminates so much friction that customers may not even know how much they’re spending until after they’ve completed a purchase. In light of this, Amazon Dash was recently deemed illegal in Germany for violating consumer protection laws.

If you’re interested in the topic of “frictionless design”, here is some related reading. Clive Thompson digs into software that aims to add friction to our lives in his Wired essay We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed Up:

It’s certainly possible to slow our software, and thereby ourselves. But it’ll happen only when we become too unsettled by the speed of our journey.

Here is Chris Palmieri in A Practice of Ethics:

But some friction is borne of respect, when we present information about the choices available to users and help them make better decisions. An emailed invoice could remind a customer they were paying for a service they no longer use. A checkbox could assure a user of their current content privacy settings before posting a sensitive photo. Recognition of a past purchase can save a customer the hassle of having to return a book they already have, or confirm that they are re-buying exactly the same shampoo.

And Andrew Grimes in Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design:

Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement deepens. We have an experience we can remember.

In short, not all friction is bad…

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall discuss some fascinating research about how people learn in their essay The Feedback Fallacy:

What findings such as these show us is, first, that learning happens when we see how we might do something better by adding some new nuance or expansion to our own understanding. Learning rests on our grasp of what we’re doing well, not on what we’re doing poorly, and certainly not on someone else’s sense of what we’re doing poorly. And second, that we learn most when someone else pays attention to what’s working within us and asks us to cultivate it intelligently.

As a parent it’s natural to see the elements of “positive parenting” in this research. We (generally) don’t have to deal with tantrums at work, but it still makes sense people would be more motivated by this approach than by reminders of what they’re doing wrong. Something to keep in mind as we work with our teams.

My friend and colleague Garrett Dimon wrote about his experiences building and selling a product in his post Hindsight. He gives some advice based on what he learned. You might not agree with everything, but I think his perspective is really interesting and worth checking out. For example, on the balance between building product and doing marketing:

I don’t want to build an operational system to grow a business and then spend no time on the product. I want to design a company to build the product and serve customers. That’s not to say that there shouldn’t be some type of marketing that will need to be done, but I’d rather find ways where marketing is a by-product of the software rather than a separate activity. Checking analytics and numbers eventually becomes relevant for a business, but it’s a spectrum. I want to check the numbers to make sure the business is healthy, but I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m spending days analyzing or optimizing.

I think most of us know by now that merely copying competitors’ features or business models is a bad idea. Jesse Weaver’s Emulation Is Not a Product Strategy does a very good job of explaining why this approach almost never works, and what to focus on instead. One example:

In focusing their efforts on emulation, product managers stop considering options that could enhance what is unique about the company and its customer base. They miss chances to deliver something powerful and unexpected. Instead, product managers should focus on unique strengths — those things their customers came for in the first place. In doubling down on those, product managers can exponentially increase a product’s value, deepening customers’ connection to the specific magic that makes a product special.

Product Management podcasts are a bit hit and miss, but this week there were two discussions that I found really interesting and useful.

First, on the Product Science Podcast, an interview with Teresa Torres on continuous product discovery:

Teresa Torres is a product discovery coach and the author of the Product Talk Blog. She spends most of her time coaching cross-functional product teams on how to adopt continuous discovery practices. On this episode of the Product Science Podcast, we get into how you can refine your product discovery practices.

And on the Product Experience Podcast, Tim Herbig discusses how to be an effective product leader when you don’t have “official” power:

Tim Herbig has made many mistakes (who hasn’t?). Fortunately for us, Tim not only owns up to his mistakes, he’s written a book to help the rest of us avoid making the same ones. We’ve all had issues with how to work best – not only within our individual teams, but with the rest of the organisation as well. In our conversation, he shares some simple and practical methods to diagnose when you have a problem and how to solve it.

Tim references Teresa’s work in his conversation, so the two episodes are really complementary as well, which is a nice bonus. Tim’s agile peer canvas to foster empathy within a team is also really interesting and worth looking into.