Painting Castles in the Air
What watching a five-year-old paint can teach you about making products
The sun is casting green light on oversized flowers while yellow birds are circling around a giant pink heart — what sounds like the inventory of an art gallery, is what a five-year-old created in our living room. Over a period of thirty minutes I witnessed the up-and-coming finger paint artist create a wonderful composition of colors and objects.
It then took little Dali only fifteen more minutes to ruin her creation in a state of creative excess, crowding the canvas with additional ideas and colors.
In less than an hour, a little girl demonstrated the benefits of experience in product management that took me years to understand.
More is Better
Especially with little experience, product managers can exhibit a similar youth-like enthusiasm for crafting product experiences. The same goes for more experienced product people that are handed a new baby. As a result, feature over feature gets added with the false hope of creating incremental value for the user — a practice also referred to as feature creep.
In the world of our five-year-old, this is resembled by the swarm of bright yellow birds distracting from the heart of the experience. Products suffering from feature creep feel bloated and confusing, leaving the user with no orientation of what is really important. At worst, they even miss out on serving the primary user need all together.
“More isn’t always better, sometimes it’s just more” — Sabrina (some 90’s movie)
However, as with so many things in life, skill comes with practice. And just like the expert painter who knows where to emphasize and where to keep it simple, product managers learn to become more focused. Over time, a holistic understanding of product and user needs is established.
The outcome, hopefully, becomes a neat and less cluttered experience.
Ambition Level: Master Painter
During our painting session, I started to wonder if design firms should hire kids to do the creative work. I put this thought aside for now, concluding that there must be some labor law preventing underaged, milk drinking finger painters to be near environments stuffed with Apple computers and portafilter espresso machines. Still, the vision that our little landscapist had created for her painting was more than impressive.
The forest glade was all planned out in her head — it was full of animals, blooming trees and bright flowers. As her grand idea did not take into account time and resources (skills), the challenge for us then was to subtly convince her to paint what was actually achievable.
Overambitious goal setting can be seen with new product managers as well. Roadmap items end up too difficult or outlandish to implement and are driven by the aspiration to conquer the world in one year (all too often with the workload of a century).
Plans will become more realistic over time, when a product manager has learned about his product, stakeholders, team, and also himself.
On to the Next One
When you are chasing a grand vision with an endless list of things to implement, you are prone to rush. Being 70% done with a task might be considered good enough as the next big thing awaits — this is how a rock ends up looking like a flying soap bubble, just because there was no time for final touches and shadowing.
Building something beautiful is hard work, especially towards the end when the finish line is in sight but the going gets tougher and tougher. However, dropping a task halfway is no alternative. The whole experience will end up feeling unfinished. Even if you are building minimum viable products, you should make sure that whatever you want to test works without flaws.
Becoming more realistic and focused in your career will inevitably create a stronger level of perseverance helping to prevent task jumping, keeping half-baked experiences down to a minimum.
Worship that Inner Child
While the picture painted so far did not put a favorable light on the overambitious, feature creeping product manager, I still love working with them. The creativity and never ending drive they spread is addictive and can move a product forward. Especially when ideas are reviewed and challenged in the product team, high creativity, actionable tasks and impactful output can be achieved.
Even experienced product managers can benefit from letting out their inner child from time to time — the creative and energetic angle can push the product to the next level.
Building castles in the air isn’t really all that bad, as long as you are aware that you are building them.
Disclaimer: No kids where harmed in the process of writing this article and the painting under review is now rightfully on proud display.
