Chapter 9: Paint Your Environment Part 6
Ever been on a project that is under time pressure to make a launch date? One common solution is to drop features from the product. For example, when Apple launched the iPad mini in November 2012, it did not have the retina display. I have no knowledge of how that decision was made, but I can easily speculate that this feature was not included to bring in the launch date.
“Sabina” was a product manager working in lifescience industry who was part of a project that had to make that very choice. She was working on a new technology to detect and quantify a particular RNA within a sample. When the original product was scoped, it was designed to meet a set of unmet customer needs, and she created a healthy revenue forecast to justify the expense of development. Sabina explained the difficulty of creating a forecast for a new technology.
“When you build [mathematical] models, you try to make an intelligent metric,” which was based on sizing the market, and estimating the market share based on what the product could do relative to the competition. Sabina explained that she felt “pressured to show there is value in doing the project, a positive NPV. I never felt that I wasn’t being truthful, [but] with a brand new technology, it’s sticking your finger in the air and making the best guess you can. There was equal pressure from myself and others.”
A forecast is built on assumptions. One key (although often unstated) assumption is that the product will meet the customer’s needs. Notice how the impact of the assumptions as Sabina continues her story.
“When I did the original model [at the start of the project] there were assumptions of what we could commercialize. [As the project progressed,] we had to cut out 2/3 of the features. Do I want to cut the revenue model? At that point if I had cut it as much as I should have, the project may have gotten killed. Yet I believed in it enough longer term, not just first release.” Sabina made a quiet internal assumption that it would take multiple iterations to get it where the customers really needed it to be.
Unfortunately, the organization was very tied to the forecasts, which came in at 25% of the pre-launch levels. This in turn meant that additional development resources were not allocated to help the product grow. And life was difficult for Sabina, with lots of questions from her management team. “I felt like a failure because [the forecast] was so off.”
In the next post, I will explore Sabina’s options, through the filter of corporate idolatry.
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