Roseanne Barr the Product Manager
A few weeks ago a friend of mine told me one of his life stories. His tales are almost always good for a laugh but more often than not, come with a nugget of wisdom.
After graduating from acting school, my friend hoped to make it big in Hollywood. In the grind of auditions and small-time gigs, he caught on to the fact that Hollywood recruited heavily from the comedy club circuit. He decided to become a regular open mic night performer at a club on the Sunset Strip.
To actually get in front of the “open mic,” you had to put your name in a lottery. If your name got drawn, you’d get a chance to do a three minute routine. To improve his chances of getting on stage, my friend would stack the deck by asking friends who would come see him perform to sign up for the open mic lottery — in his name. Sometimes this tactic actually worked.
One night while waiting for his turn to perform, he wandered into one of the other theaters at the club where well-established comics would try out new material.
That night, Roseanne Barr was on stage. The way I heard it is that she wasn’t dressed to perform — just jeans, a button-down shirt, and a pencil behind her ear. No special makeup or hairstyling. Just Roseanne, chewing gum and talking to the audience in her nasal deadpan. In fact, she wasn’t really performing at all. She was…reading a list of jokes she’d written from a pad of paper.
Roseanne would read a joke — wait for a reaction — read another joke — wait for a reaction — take the pencil from behind her ear and write something down — and then read the next joke. You get the picture. Out of perhaps fifty jokes maybe three landed and got a laugh and made it in to her routine. Iterative product development in its purest form.
We know the rest of the story with Roseanne. Eventually, she made it big, got her own TV show and became a cultural icon. Maybe some of Roseanne making it big was luck and talent but I can’t help but think that a lot of it had to do with her doing the nitty gritty work of developing her product. She came up with early-stage ideas, sketched them out on paper and then put them to the test in front of a real live audience and zeroed in on what worked.
Obviously, my friend’s experience with Roseanne has me thinking about how I create and launch products. Now and in the future, I’m more committed than ever to figuratively stand on stage with an early version of my technology product, put it in front of a large-enough audience, see what works and what doesn’t and iterate until the product is ready for primetime.
