Product Management and “Do It My Way”

“Do it my way — I have 24 years of experience in this field, so I don’t care whether you have any customer feedback or not”
 — #CowboyManager

We’ve all probably had a variation of the above invoked on us at some point in our career. It’s a classic example of an egocentric fallacy (•), where your manager believes that they know what the customer wants based on their belief that their preferences and insights are typical of the market. It also succinctly explains why so many products and services fail!

The thing is, there is nothing wrong with insights and preferences — they are actually quite valuable, and serve as an excellent short-hand for identifying actions, patterns, opportunities, and so forth.
That said, these beliefs should serve as a starting point, and not as a final decision! Use them as as the beginning of the planning process, gather user feedback, market data, evidence, etc., up to the point where you can make falsifiable decisions of the form “We believe that XXX shows that customers want YYY”.
This also allows you to checkpoint your decisions, mark your decisions to market, if you will. If (when!) it turns out that you read the market wrong, it will save you from the incessant arguing over the why.

Making this about Product Management, remember that the Product Owner’s job is to be the voice of the customer, and to communicate this to the rest of the team as the product vision. Good product owners are constantly marking their beliefs to market, validating their understanding of the customer with what the customer actually needs/wants, and updating their priors.

Great product owners don’t just do the above, they also convey this decision process to the team, generating maximal buy-in from everyone. (Remember, this buy-in is critical to success!) After all, committed and dedicated developers working towards a goal that they believe in may not be a sufficient condition for success, but it sure as heck makes success more likely!

The bottom line here is that if you are faced with a #CowboyManager, try and help them break out of this mode of thinking. If they can’t, find a different gig (if you can, of course…)

(•) Strictly speaking, the egocentric fallacy is a belief, and not a logical fallacy, but hey, let’s not go there…