I fully agree with Chris Coyier’s main point in Other People’s Busted Software is an Opportunity:

If you make software that does work reliably, you’ve got a leg up. Even if your customers don’t tell you “I like your software because it always works”, they’ll feel it and make choices around knowing it.

It feels like so many teams prioritize “innovation” over quality, so we end up getting stuck with products that have an overwhelming number of features but they all barely work—or the whole thing is slow and cumbersome. At some point we seem to have forgotten that product quality is not optional, and that it should be built in from the start.

Not only that, but in a “project” mindset teams just continue to move on to the next feature without taking the time to learn and improve what they shipped, as Marty Cagan points out in From Projects to Products:

Most efforts lose all hope of providing real value, and just try to get something shipped. Then as soon as they do finally ship, it’s not like they can iterate to improve the product. Instead, the people usually scatter off to their next assignments; nobody owning the outcome, and any important learnings from the effort likely lost.

This seems almost silly to point out, but a feature is not going to help your business if (1) it doesn’t add value and/or (2) it doesn’t work well. And yet somehow lots of teams put validation and quality on the backburner while they rush to get more features out. So Chris is right in his post: focusing on product quality is a huge differentiator in today’s software market.

I don’t think that Threads—the new Twitter-like service from Meta—is above critique. It’s noisy, it lacks a lot of features, and there seems to be a lot of desperate land-grabbing going on by various celebrities and brands. You might even say the whole thing feels off—and there is even a fairly academic reason for that feeling. In It’s Not Cancel Culture—It’s A Platform Failure Charlie Warzel reminds us about “context collapse”:

Context collapse occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another—usually an uncharitable one—which then reads said information in the worst possible faith.

We’ve probably all experienced this to some degree—you say something and it gets misunderstood or misconstrued (sometimes understandably!) by an audience that doesn’t have all the context. Anne Helen Petersen uses that concept to explain exactly why The Thread Vibes Are Off:

Twitter was for thoughts, and Instagram is for vibes—and Threads is trying to pull your Instagram feed into a Twitter format. And I’m here to tell you: THE VIBES ARE OFF. […]

What’s happening early on with Threads is that influencers are experiencing their own kind of context collapse, where their vague, sometimes vapid messages are traveling toward a different type of audience. This is pretty much what Threads feels like to me now: a place that’s ostensibly interesting (look, so many people are already here!) but is actually totally boring. It’s “fun,” but definitely not funny.

So, like I said: Threads isn’t above criticism and there’s a lot of work to be done to improve it. But I also think it’s important for the complainers to realize that it’s possible that maybe—just maybe—Threads isn’t for us. And that’s ok. One example is the constant complaints I see (and I have as well!) about the lack of a “following-only” feed, and a lot of “how could they launch without it” incredulousness. However, to that point, Sara Morrison makes this observation in TikTok is confusing by design:

TikTok is the ultimate example of how our digital world is shifting from seemingly limitless possibilities and choice—the internet of my formative years—into a controlled experience that’s optimized to know or decide what we want and then deliver it to us. And TikTok is one of the best examples of this change.

That piece is worth reading in full, but it explains how the chronological feed might be a thing of the past—and not because companies want it, but because user data shows that they want it. This is why posts like Facebook’s Threads is so depressing—which I’ve seen quoted and mentioned a lot in my various feeds—really rubs me the wrong way. It is one big wall of snark about how bad Threads is, how it should die, and how it has no redeeming qualities at all. What’s worse is that I’ve seen lots of product people quote that piece and praise it, which I find really confusing.

Yes, Threads has lots of room for improvement. I find it too chaotic (right now) for what I want in a social network. But if you scroll just a little bit it’s clear to see that people on there are having a blast—so how about we don’t judge anyone and everyone who gets on there! Isn’t having empathy for users and curiosity around certain behaviors everything in product? Shouldn’t we be impressed and interested in what we can learn from how Meta built that product to scale to 10 million users in 24 hours without a hitch?

It’s natural to get riled up about products that mean something to us, but we have to guard against blind spots when it comes to how people who are not like us use the web. It’s ok to not like Threads, but it’s not ok to negate and mock the experience of millions of people who are clearly enjoying the product immensely. Not just because it’s unkind and unnecessary, but also because we’d be losing out on a huge opportunity to learn from how that team executes.

P.S. If you are more of a visual person, here’s a 16-second Youtube video summarizing this post.

I am finally catching up on the big “Airbnb canceled PMs” debate of 2023, and like most online arguments the whole thing seems pretty silly to me. First, here’s a good overview from Aatir Abdul Rauf, in which he publishes the full quote from CEO Brian Chesky:

“…The designers are equal to product managers. Actually, we got rid of the classic product management function. Apple didn’t have it either.

5-second applause

(smiling) Let’s be careful. Hold on.

We have product marketers. We combined product management with product marketing and we said you can’t develop products unless you know how to talk about the products. We made the team much smaller and we elevated design.”

Aatir does a great job of putting the quote in context of the entire talk, so it’s well worth reading. The TL;DR is this: “Airbnb didn’t kill PM. They relabeled it and consolidated their team roles.” That seems like a completely reasonable organizational change to make within the context Airbnb is in, and considering the thought they clearly put into that decision. It definitely won’t work for every organization, but it’s also clearly not some kind of thought leadership mandate that they want to force on the entire industry.

I say good for Airbnb for making a decision that aligns their organizational design with the way they believe they can design and develop products most effectively. One last plug for Aatir’s post: he does a great job explaining the Product Marketing function, and what product managers can learn from it.

Now, the real topic I want to get to with this post is this idea of merging PM into other roles. That concept has been around as long as the profession itself. As with so much in product, it’s not inherently good or bad, it’s about the context of the change. Here’s another example (that I happen to agree with). In Melissa Perri’s response to the controversy she made a slightly different case that the PM role will start to merge with the GM role:

Product Management has always firmly sat between business, tech, and the user/customer. In SAAS companies, the Product Management role has always been about figuring out how to grow the business by solving customer problems with the right software. In other companies that are not software-native, you saw this same act being done by GMs of the business, but just with the tools available to drive the business at the time - sales, marketing, and human operations. What does a GM look like in a product-led business? Someone overseeing the teams that build the things you sell.

As more and more companies become predominately software companies, I believe the Product Management role and GM roles are going to merge. You won’t be a great GM unless you deeply understand software, along with understanding your domain. Product Management was never purely about “tech” and if companies were treating it so, of course, they didn’t see the value of the role.

The point is that organizations will always need someone who understands the product, customers, technology, and the broader market—and guides conversations towards what that all means for priorities and what to work on to help the business grow. In the current SaaS environment we’ve settled on that role being filled by product managers. That’s great, but it might not always be so, and that’s ok too. It doesn’t mean we’ll lose our jobs. It just means we’ll keep evolving.