Comments on: What is good enough? “Lame Duck” vs. Phased Releases

By: Top 10 startup articles of the week « Startup Musings

Top 10 startup articles of the week « Startup Musings — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:41:23 +0000

[...] What is good enough? Lame duck versus phased releases [...]

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:36:54 +0000

Really enjoyed this one, Gopal, thanks!

It is definitely tricky to adopt the “fail fast” philosophy of agile without creating “certain to fail” releases (lame ducks).

Scott @sehlhorst

By: TJ

TJ — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:13:39 +0000

Interesting topic… a couple thoughts to share with fellow Product Managers:

Product Management is not an easy task in any industry. But in the software industry it is even harder due to the accelerating rate of obsolescence as generations of language, platform, OS and hardware continue to roll over at an increasing rate. Couple that with the massive growth in the number of software firms, and global demand and it’s very difficult to balance between being on the cutting edge,behind the curve or having a great solution that does not yet have a market.

We chased after a competitor who developed an icon based payment reporting solution, and kept investing at the insistence of the sales reps and PM. Years later that same competitor had sold their firm, started a next generation solution and was our new partner. Once we had gotten to know each other he confided that he was amazed we followed them into that market as they never covered their investment either, much less made a return ON that investment.

Product Management always struck me as a balance between the science and fact based, with a lot of gut feel and intuition (the art). By definition, its attempting to predict what will happen by looking at historical data.

By: Rian

Rian — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:30:08 +0000

Great post, Gopal. One of the biggest dangers is not realizing a release is a lame duck until after the release… The ability to recognize it before launch (and then delay) will be a huge step in the right direction for PM’s!

By: Elaine Chen

Elaine Chen — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:29:31 +0000

Great post! Thanks for calling a spade a spade on lame duck releases. This has happened to me in 2 companies. In each case the CEO met with a customer (minus the product team). The customer demanded feature X, or we would face losing the account. So the CEO promised feature X in the next release (uh oh!) When the product team went to investigate, the feature that the customer came up with didn’t solve the problem at all. In one case we found a whole different way to solve the problem and everyone was happy in the end. In the other case, there was a DOA usability issue for which there is no workaround. So we canned the release. It wasn’t pretty, but it really helped clean up the product development process – the CEO never tried to bypass the product planning phase again.