Product Management Blog

Lean Startup: How Intuit Innovates

Video streaming by Ustream

Design Thinking...the video

Just stumbled across this...  Apparently Tim Brown gave this presentation at the MIT Sloan School (not sure why he didn't do this at HBS).

 

Dear Consumer Internet PM's...

Got a new consumer internet offering that's finally hit critical mass?  Say hello to your little friend.

If you build a popular consumer service, you should expect some FaceBook PM to launch one of these bad boys.  

The PMM will whip up a nice landing page that will read: <Your Category> Is About to Get Better with Friends."  Not saying they'll necessarily crush you (Foursquare still putting up a good fight) but you will need to assume they will always do a watered down  implementation for you to stay on top or you will need to innovate continuously to avoid the zuck steamroller.

As an example, check out what I stumbled upon tonight as a little "welcome to my world" from FB Deals PM to Groupon PM (not to mention the 100 other Groupon Clone PM's).

Doesn't look like they're messing around.  I wonder if this pattern of FB "embracing and extending" will disincent innovation?  Will some startups not get started or not get funded because every investor will (understandably) ask, what if FB copies this?  In a way, that's not too different from Windows in the 90's and Google in the 2000's but this whole 500M connected user thing seems even more difficult to overcome than people's favorite search engine...

Beware of the Integration Siren

It's tempting to invest in integration projects as your Company's product portfolio expands and invariably starts to overlap.

Here are some of the things you might hear bouncing around your head, the hallways, or exec review meetings:

1.  Why do we have 3 teams working on the same thing?

2.  If that other team built a generalized service, couldn't you focus on what's unique about your product and get more to market faster?

3.   You should work on things that have greater cross-product impact, why don't you drive this initiative to integrate all the different Foo efforts across the Bar division? 

In a lot of ways, these are all super valid and compelling arguments and often they're right.  

Things like account creation, permissioning, charting components, email alerts, check out work flows, etc. can be very costly to reproduce as the number of core products which use these things grow.   However, there are plenty of rocky shores to navigate.  Here are some things to consider before you embark on your big integration journey.