Product Management lessons from my newborn

It’s been a while since I blogged but I’ve been keeping busy since my last post… officially moved to the Bay Area, settled into the new job and, on August 30th, became a proud father of a healthy, beautiful baby girl. As a first-time parent, I realize that there is an infinite amount of learning ahead of me – this is merely the beginning. However, as I was spending yet another sleep-deprived night trying to decipher my daughter’s cues I saw some great product management lessons staring me in the face… literally. I’m finding lessons from my newborn and Mother Nature about how to launch a new product or business, nurture it and see it grow.

As a species, we’ve had the time to perform billions of iterations to come up with just the right handful of skills a human newborn needs to survive and thrive. It feels like there is a profound lesson here to guide those of us who struggle with new beginnings in other realms – like products and businesses. Mother Nature isn’t shooting for a ‘full-featured’ person at birth but it is very clearly setting the newborn up for success – with innate attributes and abilities (however few) to advantageously use its environment.

I just have a strong hunch that if most mere-mortal Product Managers were writing a Product Requirements Document for a human being… it would detail out the abilities of a well-adjusted, able-bodied 21-year old and explain why most of those skills are essential. That’s why I want to get this post out while all of these thoughts are fresh in my mind so I can look back at it someday when I am confronted with planning and launching something brand new.

Be irresistible
Babies are designed to be ‘cute’ – with their big eyes, large foreheads and chubby cheeks they tap into deep evolutionary programming in the adult mind and compel grown-ups to care for them and protect them. In fact there is ample research that points to the fact that all functioning adults (especially new parents) tend to be attracted to a baby’s cuteness – talk about precise target marketing. Babies may not be able to impress with insightful speeches, physical feats or sharp wit but they can and do mesmerize their own parents and caregivers. The lesson here is that, in the early days, being irresistible to the target demographic is more important than being ‘full-featured’ (quick side rant – as with people, products and businesses have to constantly learn and grow so there is no such thing as a full list of features on day one). Find the target customers of your product and business and understand them well enough to build something basic but truly irresistible – nothing else will do. This means minimizing the features to a point of discomfort and maximizing the beauty and elegance of the user experience to a point of obsession.

Fixate on the early adopters
The apparently underdeveloped senses of a baby are in fact highly tuned to identify and bond with their parents and primary caregivers. At a very early stage, babies make strong associations with the smells and sounds of their parents/caregivers and use this information to create strong loving bonds. There is scientific evidence that every time an infant feeds it reinforces the olfactory association to Mom in its brain. Even though babies are handed a set of underdeveloped senses, their focus on identifying and bonding with those who sustain them is pretty awe-inspiring and instructional. Early-stage products or businesses need just as much TLC as a newborn infant in order to survive, so it’s essential to fixate on the early adopters who will provide support and sustenance. There will always be critics who will seek to diminish your brand-new product by making comparisons to mature alternatives but, in the early days, you must ignore them. Once you have a relationship in place, the early adopters will help you grow stronger and become more capable.

Have an open mind and learn
Babies aren’t born with a lot of experiences to draw from but they are wired to learn – every waking minute they are soaking up information about their new surroundings, their parents and their own bodies. As a new parent, I am constantly doing things (some of them rather silly) to feed this insatiable desire for learning. It seems like Mother Nature is urging us product people to build products and organizations that are designed to learn from the get-go. Since all product groups and businesses operate with precious few resources, why waste them on building a few more premeditated features that may or may not resonate – why not spend the effort to instrument your product to be aware of when, where and how it’s being used and by whom? You can then use the data to spur deeper conversations with your users, understand why it’s being used the way it is and grow the product to make it more relevant, easier to use and more delightful.

Without a doubt, parenting is the most joyful and the most challenging thing I will ever do but I’m glad that this process is teaching me as much as it’s teaching my baby daughter. I am convinced that I can couple my insights as a parent with my renewed caffeine dependence to become a better Product Manager – I have a feeling that there are more posts like this in my future.

Author: Ravi Akella

Software and Web Product Manager, living the life in the Pacific NW. View all posts by Ravi Akella