Great Idea? Who Cares?

A while ago, my VP of Engineering said something both simple and profound: "People think good ideas are rare. They're not. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. Execution and delivery is rare and hard."

It's one of those things that you just KNOW if you have worked in software for any length of time. As a product manager (PM) I can tell you that every product I have ever worked on had an insanely deep backlog of ideas. I mean literally thousands of ideas for complex products like Splunk Enterprise or vSphere.

So, yeah. Ideas we have.

What is interesting is how you see the media or pundits lauding the IDEA instead of the expression of the idea. For example, we see tons of online articles praising companies for being innovative. Like this list:

https://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/list

I mean, yeah, it's fun to talk about companies and which ones are doing great work and why, but frankly I am not terribly interested in how innovative they are. How well are they doing? Do customers love their products? How did they solve tough problems? How do they maintain their operational excellence? These are the things that matter.

When you look at the list, it does nothing but raise questions in my mind. For example, Nvidia is #2. I mean, OK. They have great GPUs and they have hugely benefited from GenAI. However, that's NOT WHY THEY BUILT THEM. Nvidia wasn't the first GPU maker. They made some great chips and ultimately wound up being top dog, but all this happened way way before GenAI. My guess is that what makes Nvidia work is amazing operational and logistical execution. I've worked for hardware companies before and making that business work is REALLY HARD.

How the heck did they wind up betting the company on GenAI? Was it an accident? Did they get lucky? Did they actually figure this out in advance and develop custom technology?

Honestly, I have no idea and I'd like to know.

Notice that there is nothing about amazing ideas here. Nvidia is a story of capturing the market, taking advantage of market trends and building a good product over a long period of time. There are other GPU companies, there are other GenAI companies. Very little Nvidia does is completely original, they're just better at it than others. That's why they are doing so well (and probably in part due to a good amount of luck).

So, why am I going on my little rant about ideas?

It's because I'd like Product Management teams to STOP focusing on generating ideas. I think that's a poor excuse for PM and I'd like it to stop.

As a PM team, we need to understand, at a fundamental level, what our target personas need, what they want and how they view our product. We need to understand our competitors, what they are doing and what is working well. We need to make good choices based on evidence. We need to be consistently correct in our decisions and thus we need a very strong baseline for evaluating trade offs. If you do all those things, the odds are that your product will do well in market. No guarantees, but every product team I have been on that did those things did well in market.

What's missing here?

Yeah, ideas. That's the one thing you don't need.

I mean, yeah, we all have ideas. I have ideas. My entire team has ideas. Engineering has ideas. Marketing has ideas. Sales has ideas. See where I am going here? Ideas everywhere. Most of them are terrible. Some of them are amazing. How to tell the difference?

Yeah, see above. MAKE GOOD CHOICES BASED ON EVIDENCE.

That's really it. That's all that matters. The quality and quantity of my ideas doesn't enter into it most of the time.

And yet, in PM interviews you get questions about ideas: about how innovative you are, about how you created new ideas for the product. Over and over again.

Let's say you are sitting in a meeting. Someone has an idea. They think this idea is AMAZING. I mean like ground breakingly amazing. What do you do about it? Here's what you don't do: You don't sit around in that meeting room discussing that idea and agreeing that you are all amazing people. That is a waste of time. What you do is say, "If this idea is good, what would improve? How can we test this idea?"

Then you test.

And I mean aggressively try to prove yourself wrong.

If you go try to prove yourself right, you will probably do so. Humans are incredibly creative. We will see proof that we are correct if we look for it. We call this "confirmation bias" in the PM business and I can tell you from personal experience that it is very very real. The only way to combat this is to be contrarian. Try to prove yourself wrong. Seek out evidence that you're wrong. Talk to customers directly, look at usage data, investigate your competitors. Do the things that we are supposed to do as PMs. When you can't do that, you still may be wrong but your odds are better.

One of my favorite sayings about PM is that we need to have "strong opinions, loosely held." While some don't like this phrase, I love it. When I see a good idea, it gives me permission to love it and be excited about it but also gives me permission to question it and change my mind when evidence says I'm wrong. Of course, this is easy to say and super hard to do. Humans generally try to hold on to strong opinions. This means that this is a skill you need to develop over time. Work on it actively. Support colleagues who exhibit this trait. Praise them for changing their minds.

If you are a PM leader, ask "why". Why did you stack rank this feature? Why do you think this is your biggest problem? Why should we build your feature instead of this other feature? This is your primary job as a leader of PM. Help your team make good decisions. Poor PM leaders see themselves as the source of good ideas. This is extremely limiting. Great PM leaders enable their teams to make the call and support those teams. The good ideas are out there, you just need to find them and figure out which ones to build. For this, you need a culture that supports data-driven decision making and allows people to question every decision. If you're not doing that as a PM leader your team is not as effective as it could be.