Product Management: A Dirty Little Secret

“It might not be good but people will still use it”

The other day I wrote about the impressive launch of Rockmelt. Today I read one of the first reviews of the browser from TechCrunch’s MG Siegler. You can read the review for yourself here but the long and short of it is Mr. Siegler gave it a tepid review at best. It did shed light on an interesting fact I was unaware of, the browser is built on top of Chromium. I find it interesting because of the ongoing rhetoric between Google and Facebook this week., and because, admittedly, I did not know that Chromium as a platform was so open that it was being leverage in this way. But I also found it interesting because of Mr. Siegler’s commentary that Rockmelt felt more like Chrome plugins than an actual socially oriented browser.

His contention is that it will take one of the major social networking players to deliver a browser that is truly dedicated to a ‘social web’ browsing experience. Facebook is the obvious front runner for such a product of course. But getting there will obviously be a challenge for Facebook or for any company making a run against the current browser status quo (although it is amazing to me just how competitive the browser market has become in the last five years). Why is that when one of the biggest challenges for Google, as stated by Siegler, is that a Chrome release that was dedicated to integrating a social web browsing experience would most likely feel tacked on? Well because Google might not have to worry about that because they have a Chrome user base of nearly 100 million (about a 9% share of the browser market). A user base that simply gets all upgrades pushed out to them. So if and when Google decides to release a social version of Chrome Mr. Siegler put it this way, “It might not be good, but people would still use it.”

That single sentence is the dirty little secret of Product management. And good product managers understand that they need to know exactly where the line is between ‘might not be good’ and ‘sucks to a point that I’m treating my users with contempt’. It is a line, however, that every serious product manager must toe. Failure to establish a ‘might not be good’ tolerance level frequently results in poorly timed releases and extremely heavy functionality. At its worse nobly working to avoid ‘might not be good’ can completely scuttle not just a release but an entire product.

Let’s be clear what we are talking about here. This is not to suggest that product managers put forth subpar efforts, but that they focus on clearly articulating the actual requirement to their product development teams. If they are completely confident that the requirements are not only well defined but well prioritized then they must direct development to aggressively offer up solutions that meet both. Along the way, as they evaluate these alternatives, product managers have to ask not necessarily is this the absolutely best way to meet that high priority requirement, but determine whether or not the requirement is met with an acceptable level of usability.

It is an uncomfortable place in which to decide to be sure. But it is in this zone of discomfort where a product manager proves their worth. Some would argue that it is ultimately a matter of whether not you ‘have it’ or not when it comes to this sort of decision making. And while product managers of more mature lines and established user bases face it with more frequency, even completely new development efforts must make the same calls in order to actually complete the effort.

The reward for successfully navigating such a difficult choice? Market share protection. Siegler offers up the example of Facebook getting around to launching their own browser. They would face a tremendous hurdle of having users switch browsers. Here in lies the value in ‘might not be good’. If, in this case, Chrome was ‘good enough’ with social browsing the barrier for Facebook browser adoption would be set fairly high. This would help hold off the competition, and force them to pour more resources into the fight.

We might not like that ‘might not be good’ is an option, but unfortunately this is one of the harsh realities of a competitive landscape. So don’t hate the practitioners for doing what they must. Unless they have crossed the line, in which case the punishment is a betrayed user community.

Of course there is a secret weapon to deal with this dirty little product management secret – product marketing. But that is a post for another time.