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The 48 Hour Product – 5 Lessons for Product Managers from Startup Weekend
// September 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // Uncategorized
The role of a good product manager is to be the lynchpin of their team, helping to establish a clear product vision, owning the success or failure of their product and bridging the gaps between marketing and engineering. This can be hard enough when the members of the team all know each other well and have an established working relationship, but when nobody knows each other the complexity (and risk of failure) increases significantly.
This is the exact same situation faced at Startup Weekend, where close to 180 people came together to pitch their ideas and try to see them through to reality. I was fortunate this year to work with a very good team. The idea was straightforward, social, real time and niche, all great hallmarks of a tangible web product. The core idea was to create a community for writers of short fiction, where stories could be easily shared and feedback provided to help aspiring writers improve. We ultimately called this product HalfWrit, and I personally feel we managed to hit all the right notes. By 11:00 am on the first day of development we had a full product features list for the MVP (Minimum Viable Product), by 12:00 pm we had wireframes for each page of the site and by somewhere around 2:00 pm we had working code and the basics of the site together. One by one the features were implemented until finally by 6:00pm the next day we had a fully functioning site with avatars, activity streams, a “follow” model and user generated groups.
So what can we learn about successful product development from this activity? Looking at the activities of our team alone, there are 5 key lessons to take away from this, all of which can (and should) translate into your day to day product development activities:
- Understand Your Objectives
- Establish a Clear Vision
- Keep it Simple, Stupid
- Communicate Clearly
- Value Everyone
We’ll go into more depth on each of these topics in the full body of this post. Click on “read more” to continue.
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