Social Driven Product Management

The Facebook email announcement was big. . .for the future of product management

I just watched the Facebook announcement on their new messaging system. I’ll save the summary for other blogs and news outlets (here is one, but just in case you don’t care to click through the long and short of it is Facebook has integrated receipt and distribution of text/sms, instant messages, Facebook messages and email into one place – Facebook; and oh they’ll archive everything for you so you can wax nostalgic over those first messages you exchanged with the now mother of your 3 children). So let’s forget about the merit of where they are headed for a moment, and instead look at the fact that Facebook seems to continuously be content to be the innovation whiteboard of the social web.

It is a pretty interesting dynamic to witness. They seem to create functionality with a macro level vision in mind, an idea, a conceptual ideal, and then launch it into the user community and allow them to decide how it will evolve. In my opinion the way that it evolves is not as much of a care as whether or not it does indeed evolve. What does seem to be consistent is that Facebook wants to own what they call the ‘social graph’. They seem to make no apologies over driving hard to posses every single element of an individual’s online presence. While there will always be the privacy hawks concerned about what such an objective will yield, it is reassuring in a way to know that they remain incredibly focused on their strategy. While I obviously do not know for sure, I get the feeling that there is a sense at Facebook that just as easily as they raced to multi-billion dollar valuation there is realization that it could all be erased in a matter of disruptive technology moments. Therefore the battle for them seems to be against time not necessarily other competition. To map out the ‘social graph’ and embed themselves in it in such a way that regardless of how tech is disrupted the nuance of how digital information is shared is already grafted upon the tech consuming public.

This is what struck me the most in watching young Misters Zuckerberg and Bosworth roll out the new messaging capabilities, they appear to sincerely want to place a significant amount of trust in their user community to define how their innovations are applied. And they are not the only ones doing it, it is just that Facebook does so on a massive scale. And because they have been so wildly successful with a pace of innovation that becomes exponentially faster it could be ushering in the dawn of a new method of product management.

The technique Facebook appears to deploy in prioritizing functionality is shared by social media tech as well as cloud computing tech companies across industries. The common theme seems to lie in how the capability is deployed and how it is defined out of the gate. Deployment happens over time in several phases, frequently using an ‘invite only’ phase for clients or users the company targets. Another commonality would be in the stark lack of definition of how the capability ought to be used. So while the conceptual objectives of the features are generally defined the users of the newly released tech are the ones to ultimately decide their implementation, use and value. The staged rollout provides a built in period of modification in order to ensure that mass roll out goes smoothly and the most likely use of the capability is understood.

This seems to me to be a fairly significant shift in product management methodologies that have been used over the last two decades and inherently impact product marketing as well. These new Social Driven Product Management methods seem to focus on the following:

1. Define conceptual objectives: The new paradigm seems to suggest that focusing in on the discrete and detailed definition of the problem/solution equation at targeted user levels yields potentially boxed in capabilities that solve a pre-defined set of addressable marketplace issues. The social driven product management methodology appears to suggest that the more important objective would be focus instead on longer term ideological objectives of what the user community seeks. With these conceptual goals defined, to then engineer capabilities that will work towards realizing that vision.
2. Under engineer: Ease of use is the driving force behind social driven product management. This results in functionality that is not broad and rich but narrow and shallow. Not shallow as in not meaningful, but shallow in the terms of not confusing. If the capabilities are appropriately engineered against the longer term goal or vision than what is the one thing that it needs to do really well in order to advance the cause?
3. Socialize: The invitation style / staged rollout serves two purposes. The first seems to be promotion and marketing (not to mention buzz) of the new tool with those most likely to talk and write about it. The second is to target most likely hardcore users who will immediately exploit not only the weaknesses of the capability but to the natural perhaps undefined strengths. It is nothing like a beta cycle of the desktop or enterprise software age, where the beta existed only to identify bugs and to test things like scalability, but an honest to goodness feedback loop that provides practical perspective as well as a real world case incubator of application.
4. Passive general availability: The process makes a big splash early but broad adoption is something that happens outside the glare of the bright lights of launch. By the time the entire user community has access to the capabilities it might be months after the initial launch. By this time the kinks have been worked out, there is a greater appreciation for how the functionality is being used, and an overall narrative on how to consider the new tools in the marketplace.

This begs several questions in my mind. What does a market requirement document look like? Is it as necessary? Is this applicable only for consumer oriented ‘new media’ technology? Can this approach be leveraged for enterprise level business applications? Are agile project management techniques required to handle this sort of delivery? Speed seems to be primary objective; does this mean release cycles need to be re-evaluated?

These may just be the tip of the iceberg and a topic that I’m looking forward to see mature. In the mean time I think it is a good idea for any product manager of any sort of tech to pay close attention to how the likes of a Facebook is managing product and releasing it into the marketplace.