The Business of Software blog just posted my latest essay! Here are some excerpts, and you can read the rest there:
Most of you have the ambition to get big. How do you do that? The only way to get big as a product company is for people to buy your product. Preferably a lot of people, for significant amounts of money at a time. Duh!
But why would people buy your product? We know there are products that people don’t buy. We don’t want those – because you can’t get big, or even grow at all. If you look at the revenue line for a product that no one buys – it’s nasty! We don’t like that line!
Why Do We Get Revenue?
Compare it to our desired revenue line – up and to the right – and accelerating as it goes up. If our product sells like that, it means it’s solving an important problem for some people – important enough that people will pay for the solution.
You can have a beautiful product, beautifully engineered and architected, and totally rocking in usability – but if it doesn’t solve a big market problem – flat line.
But a product can have some warts, not quite work as the user expects all the time, have some typos, use a 1998 style UI – but if it solves a big problem better than anything else – up and to the right.
Read the rest, including thoughts about the real definition of product management (it’s not just about finding problems) at the Business of Software blog.
