Tony Fadell: Great PMs Kill Features
iPhone and Nest creator Tony Fadell argued that a key skill for great product managers is ruthlessly prioritizing by killing features that don't solve real problems. 'PMs don’t just ship features. They kill them,' Fadell stated. He asserted that every element of a product, from features to UI, should have to 'fight to exist.'
- In his book "Build," Tony Fadell explains that product managers are, most importantly, the voice of the customer, ensuring teams don't lose sight of the ultimate goal: happy customers. They achieve this by looking for areas where the customer is unhappy and unraveling the root of the problem. - Fadell divides product development into three stages: V1 is about creating the initial product with a minimal feature set, V2 focuses on fixing issues and improving it based on early customer feedback, and V3 is about building the business and scaling. - He emphasizes that the product is just one part of a larger customer journey that begins long before a purchase and continues long after. This entire experience, from discovery and installation to support and returns, must be mapped out and prototyped. - Fadell advocates for starting with a real, painful customer problem rather than a technology looking for a solution. He contrasts the success of Uber, which solved the clear problem of finding a cab, with technologies like Google Glass that were initially less focused on a specific user need. - A key responsibility for a product manager, according to Fadell, is to create the product's story and messaging from the very beginning. This narrative helps define what the product should do and why it matters to people, ensuring the story is cohesive from the start. - Great product managers must be master negotiators and communicators who can influence teams without direct authority. They need to know which battles to fight for the sake of the customer and when to save their efforts for another day. - Fadell stresses that when developing a second-generation product, the focus should shift from disruption to improvement based on real customer data, rather than drastic changes to features users have grown accustomed to.
