Remix: A Lesson for Product Managers from the King of Rock and Roll

Elvis Presley’s last Platinum single was released in 2002, 25 years after his death and 34 years after its initial release. The success of “A Little Less Conversation” provides a valuable lesson to product managers.

Often as product managers we are focused on two areas: New Features and Technical Debt. This myopic view can sometimes cause us to overlook opportunities to enhance or improve existing features through remixing.

“A Little Less Conversation” was originally written for the movie Live A Little, Love A Little. While not one of the most popular songs Elvis was known for “A Little Less Conversation” still had enough drive to be included on the ’68 Comeback Special album.

The video above is from the ’68 Comeback Special. If you’re at work, plug in those headphones and give it a listen… it’s OK we’ll wait for you.

In 2002 Tom Holkenburg, master alchemist, electronic daredevil, and breaker of sound barriers, remixed the song. He lowered Elvis’s voice while emphasizing the original guitar and horns while overlaying a funk beat. The result was the Elvis vs. JXL version released in 2002.

The JLX version went to #1 in ten countries in 2002, 34 years after its initial release.

Often as product managers we are focused on two areas: New Features and Technical Debt. This myopic view can sometimes cause us to overlook opportunities to enhance or improve existing features.

So what can we learn from The King of Rock and Roll beyond how delicious a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich really is?

Look for opportunities to improve existing features in your product by remixing them to increase the value to your users.

Example:

In a former product we had an option for users to fill out their user profile with contact information. It was a useful, but not critical feature. Adoption (users actually filling out the data) was a bit anemic when we looked at the data. So we added features like the ability for an administrator to send a reminder email to users to fill out the data.

Users voluntarily filling out the data remained low and we had a number of possible product enhancements in the backlog to try and improve the situation (allow administrators to import the data, send automated reminders to users, create additional reports on adoption, etc). None of those seemed like they would really improve the situation and there were other higher priority features to be built, so the existing functionality was deemed “good enough” and we moved on.

Every 6 months we had a 2 day hackathon to allow our developers to explore new features, fix a bug they had a particular passion for or to try out some new technology. At one of these hackathons a UI developer I’d worked closely with in the past decided he would play around with gamification in our application.

Gamification is the application of game design elements and game design principles in non-gaming applications.

So he created a user icon badge that would fill to show % complete as a user added their contact information into the application. As the user added data it would increase the percentage completed until it reached 100%.

It was a pretty simple piece of code. So after the hackathon I added it to the next sprint where we had some room. Code was checked in, tested and shipped in the next release. It was such a minor change we only gave it a single line in the release notes.

We had no idea the feature would turn out to be wildly popular with end users. How did we find out? Well, I’d like to say it was because we added additional reporting metrics to track the effectiveness of the change, but it wasn’t. Instead it turned out that if a customer had disabled collecting certain types of information from their end users it became impossible for them to reach the 100% complete mark. So within a few hours of release we had several calls pointing out the error. Turns out users really like things to be 100% complete. Ooops… a simple change was hotfixed in to remedy the situation the next day.

Bottom Line

If you can find new ways to provide value to customers by remixing and improving existing features you can deepen the relationship with current customers and deliver a more compelling solution to future ones.

Look at your product and other existing or adjacent technologies. Is there a way to combine a feature in your product with another product your users regularly use to improve the overall experience?

Remix and reuse. Become the master alchemist, product daredevil, and breaker of feature barriers to improve your product and go Platinum.

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine. — Elvis Presley

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