Shaping what matters
After many years working with digital products, I am still astonished to see how many individuals and companies that are willing to spend a large portion of their time, energy and money to work on products that are fairly likely never to be launched or that seem doomed to fail before they are launched. Often this is the result of messy stakeholder compromises, inability to prioritise or the lack of a focused and well considered value proposition.
Generally, working as an “outsider” with our clients, I am somewhat aware but of course not fully immersed in the challenges of internal politics in complex organisations. Nevertheless, it would seem the business case of not building mediocre products is rather compelling. It would have a massive impact on both our market competitiveness and the hidden costs of maintaining a unsuccessful product over a long period of time. That said, of course this doesn’t make it easy to launch successful products, especially in large, complex organisations.
I believe in carefully reflecting on my work as an individual, to consider whether I believe it is genuinely meaningful or not. Why would I keep on working for a project that I don’t believe in? or a company that doesn’t recognise it is a bad product proposition? etc. etc. — In order to pay my bills? Well, perhaps, but only to a certain extent.
I believe in the Gandhi statement “Be the change you wish to see in the world” (or correctly quoted : “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”)
If we do not take a step back and choose to work on the products and with the teams we genuinely believe in, how do we expect any of our work to have a meaningful impact? Then we need to ask ourselves — are we happy going through life knowing that what we spend our precious time on might never ever truly matter? (of course, on a purely philosophical level, one could argue that nothing ever matters anyway… but I’ll leave that for different kind of discussion)
Well, looking at my own work over the years, I can’t deny that a great deal never quite reached it’s potential — it was either not implemented or resulted in less than optimal products. Some of those projects I do regret. However, some were genuinely meaningful in a different way and I felt committed to the work, as I know that even if it never fully reached my ambitions, there was still something there worth working on, something that mattered. Sometimes, it wasn’t the product that was the real outcome, it was the change in the process of making the product that made the real difference. Sometimes it was simply that we had to work on this product, even if we knew it was going to fail, in order to challenge the status quo.
More importantly, because of the experience that I have had, I have come to realise how much it truly matters to work on products and projects that make a genuine difference, in one way or another.
These reflections are just some initial food for thought. My intention with productmind.com is continue sharing my personal experiences and reflections on:
- What does it mean to have genuine intent or purpose?
- How do we know that our product will fulfil that purpose?
- How do we uncover insights or validate ideas?
- How do we envision success so that we can achieve our goals?
- How do we share our vision with the teams we work with?
- What risks do we take in trying to achieve our purpose?
- How do we define guiding principles that keep us on track?
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