Thinking Styles for Developing Successful Products

I originally wrote this entry for NetApp internal use, because we've been talking this week about the most effective way to organize engineering groups and business units, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the subject.

I have a simple model of product development. To develop a successful product, I believe that you need three distinct styles of thinking:

Technology-centric thinking is about how things work, about new emerging technologies, and about changing trend-lines in existing technologies. A good example is our CTO Steve Kleiman's observation, years ago, that disk was going to get cheap enough to replace tape for backup. (Disk-to-disk backup is now one of the fastest growing parts of our business.)

Management-centric thinking is about resources and time management—the people, dollars, labs, schedules, action items required to complete a product.

Customer-centric thinking (aka product management) focuses on the pain-points that customers have—the problems that they care so much about that they are willing to spend money to solve. Tom Mendoza's summary is, "Customers don't open their wallets unless they are in pain."

According to my theory, you get pathological behavior if you are missing any one of the three styles.

Without customer-centric thinking, you get a wonderful design that works great and ships on time, except it turns out that customers won't pay money for it, even though they might admire it as a technical achievement.

Without management-centric thinking, you get a great idea for a product that customers would definitely pay lots of money for, except you never manage to build it or ship it.

Without technology-centric thinking, you get a product idea that customers would love to buy, and plenty of people and money to build it with, except you can't build anything that actually works. Here's a story to make this pathology more vivid:

A product-manager says to an engineer, "Here's my plan for a great new kind of wallpaper. You know how wallpaper is a pain to install? Like the glue is all messy, and it wrinkles, and you can never get the pattern to align from one piece to the next. Well ours won't be like that. It'll go up clean and easy and perfectly aligned. But it won't cost any extra. Customers will love it!"

The engineer says, "Wow, how does that work?"

The product manager replies, "I have no idea. That's your department!"

You not only need all three styles of thinking, but I believe it is best if you can organize to keep them close together. Startups can be so amazingly productive because all three are in close, day-to-day proximity. In larger companies, business units (BUs) can make engineers more effective by pulling the three styles closer together. (Ideally all three should be physically close to each other as well.) If the same person can do multiple styles, that's best of all, although hard to find. The smaller the startup or BU the better, except that you can't tackle such big problems. Of course, having too many BUs in a large company creates other problems, so in the end you have to balance the advantages and disadvantages of large and small.