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Sandra Grady
Normally I do this by explaining the critical responsibilities and the necessary character traits and skills, but in this article I will be taking a very different approach. I want to instead introduce you to real people.
The products are all iconic, and everyone that reads this will know of every product I describe, but few people know the actual product managers behind these products. And fewer still know the back stories behind these successful products.
They focused on things like Word Count which is used 10 times a day by every press person to make sure that it was lightning fast, as the press used the feature as their performance barometer. They even made it faster than the feature on Windows.
In subsequent years, not only did Microsoft once again decide to diverge the code base, they completely separated the teams into different buildings and business units, and had them fully embrace all things Mac. Strategically it was a complete 180.
But back in 1999, a then very young Netflix based in Los Gatos with less than 20 employees, was on the edge of going bust. They had a couple experienced co-founders, including the now legendary Reed Hastings, but the problem was that they were stuck at about 300,000 customers.
Even worse, DVD sales were starting to lag, and a Hollywood backlash further muddied the situation. Then there were challenges with fulfillment logistics, difficulty maintaining DVD quality, and trying to figure out how to do all this in a way that covered costs and generated some cash.
They knew they needed to somehow get customers to want a blend of expensive and less expensive titles. Necessity being the mother of invention, this is where the queue, the ratings system, and the recommendation engine all came from. Those were the technology-powered innovations that enabled the new, much more desirable business model.
They also re-wrote the billing system to handle the monthly subscription model (a funny little side story is that they actually launched without this as they had the 30 day free trial month, which bought them the extra time they needed).
Between working with the co-founders on the strategy, validating concepts with the users, assessing the analytics, driving features and functionality with the team, and working with finance on the new business model, marketing on acquisition, and the warehouse on fulfillment, you can imagine the workload Kate faced on a daily basis.
Yet the team got the new service up and running and used this to power and grow their business for another 7 years, until they disrupted themselves again by moving aggressively to the streaming model.
The new sales team, under Omid Kordistani, was off to a strong start selling keywords to large brands and placing the results at the top of the search results, highlighted as an ad, but still very prominent, much in the style that had been done in search results at other companies, including at Netscape where Omid came from. Sales was nervous that this idea of a self-service advertising platform would diminish the value of what the sales team was trying to sell.
And the engineers, which had been working so hard to provide highly relevant search results, were undersandably very worried that users would be confused and frustrated by ads getting in the way of their search results.
This is yet another example of how there are always so many good reasons for products not to get built. In the products that succeed, there is always someone like Jane behind the scenes working to get over each and every one of the objections, be they technical or business or anything else.
One such early possibility she found were city center venues that had these large electronic billboard screens that were capable of video. But she observed that these venues were just playing the same thing you could watch on your television at home, even though the context and audience was very different.
So Alex proposed a series of experiments where she would have editorial teams assemble specific tailored content suitable for specific venues and audiences, and then she would measure the audience reach and engagement.
Camille was a product manager on the iTunes team at Apple, and as you might imagine with such a disruptive and ground-breaking product, she experienced and learned a great deal during her formative product years at Apple, especially as she was there during the years moving from the iTunes original DRM-based music, to DRM-free, was critical in helping iTunes to become truly mass market.
Moving beyond early adopters into mass market involved many different efforts, some product, some marketing, and some a blend of the two. A good example of this blend was the relationship the iTunes team engaged with the American Idol program.
For startups or smaller companies, often all it takes is a strong product team with a strong product manager, but in larger companies, in truth it usually takes more than that. It takes strong product leadership, in the best sense of the word, including providing a compelling product vision and strategy.
The engineering teams were worried about from moving from a two-year release train model to continuous development and deployment. Especially while assuring quality. They were also concerned that responsibility for service availability was now going to be much higher.
Lea knew she had a tough job in front of her and her teams. She realized that in order for all of these inter-related pieces to be able to move together in parallel, she needed to very clearly articulate a compelling vision of the new whole as greater than the sum of the parts.
Lea then began a sustained and exhausting campaign to continuously communicate with leaders and stakeholders across the entire company. To Lea, there was no such thing as over-communication. A continuous stream of prototypes helped keep people excited about what this new future would bring.
It is easy to see how big companies with lots of revenue at risk would hesitate to make the changes they need to not only survive, but thrive. Lea tackled these concerns and more head on with a clear and compelling vision and strategy, and clear and continuous communication to the many stakeholders.
Now in every case I just described, each of the product managers went out of their way to emphasize to me just how amazing their team was, and how in no way was the success due to their efforts alone, but hopefully these examples help make clear to you the true and essential contribution of the product manager.
You may have noticed that I am very much interested in everything AI at the minute. I have published videos on YouTube and TikTok, as well as a couple posts here on this blog. Despite all controversies and the agitation in the Art world, I am convinced this trend is here to stay and grow even more. Not only in Art but in other domains too.
So here are the AI Desktop Calendars for this month. You can right-click (or tap) to save them individually or download the full package from the link at the bottom of this page. I'm not entirely sure whether my server settings will compress the images to speed up the page loading time, so I recommend downloading the zip file.
The images come from different experiments and may not fit all the diverse desktop resolutions. But they should fit a 16:9 monitor without stretching. Now that I have decided to embark on this project, I will try to better optimise them in the next months (and offer more diverse genres).
I hope you will enjoy these AI Desktop Calendars as much as I enjoyed creating them. Come back next month for the next series!
Also check the Abstract Wallpapers for Smartphone (and guess whether they're AI or not).
Thanks!
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