Tag Archives: Product Management

The goal of the road towards the goal

When you start the journey your destination is only an imagination or “It is like the dot in the horizon “

Before we start we will have to keep in mind that “there is no one way to the goal”. Choosing the right path and resources for that path is going to determine your success.

That makes me feel that the journey is more important than destiny because when you achieve the goal you will start chasing the next one.

If you can’t pick the correct roads then every goal will end up as a challenge for you.

If you have to achieve the goal then you have to enjoy the journey towards that. If you have to enjoy the journey then you have to be skillful enough to pick the road and the tools that make your journey an enjoyable one.

Sorry to make you confused, let me break it down.

Imagine you are planning the roadmap for the product. All stakeholders will have a lot of different wants and needs. All of them will throw their wants and needs onto the table.

Now as a product manager you have a lot of stakeholders to satisfy and a lot of targets to look at. On top of these, you will have your own list.

This leaves you in a tough position. When you look at all of them you should be able to see 100 different paths to the goal. At the same time, you should be able to identify the right one which should stand out from the rest.

That identification comes with experience. The experience which you have gained through failures and successes of the past.

This is where “ The Goal of the Road towards Goals” becomes important. When you are planning you should relook at the past roads which you have been through. Think about the areas where you have failed, what & who helped you in getting up from that.

Learn from each failure and success, then apply all of them in the current one.

Using these pick a road and tools which you believe will take you towards the goals. In other words “ Trust your Gut”.

Whenever you do this always remember the journey is important because if you are picking a journey that you can’t enjoy then you might achieve the goal but you won’t have the endurance for the next challenge.

I believe picking the “Goal of the road towards the goal” is more important than “achieving the goal somehow”. Because life is an endless chase of goals you should enjoy the journey rather than the destination.

As I said earlier when you reach the dot on the horizon, you will realize there is another dot on the horizon far away and you will have to chase that.

Photo by Sead Dedić on Unsplash

Photo by John Lockwood on Unsplash

Photo by Chris Hayashi on Unsplash

https://bivekrenuji.medium.com/the-goal-of-the-road-towards-the-goal-87ebcf7dc4e8

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Innovation is “Passion” driven & Not “Dollar” Driven

Innovation

I recently had a session with a CEO of a digital commerce company, with around 300 plus employees. As part of the new initiatives, the company is ready to pump in money for innovation and build new products in the e-commerce space.

He wanted to explore the ways by which he can start the product culture in the company and also he wanted to discuss the failures they had in building some of their products.

That meeting actually triggered me to write about this.

Why innovation hubs of many of the companies fail in spite of having the best talents and unlimited funding?

Innovation is driven by passion and not via Dollars. So what is the trait of passionate people and companies? Being passionate requires hard work, dedication, willingness to fail over and over again, more than everything you have to be empathetic.

Because every innovation is solving some problem of a user. You can’t solve it unless you understand it. We have to be empathetic to find that “Why”.

So for creating empathy you have to put aside your own viewpoints and start seeing and feeling things from another person’s perspective.

Then you will be able to analyze the emotions, pains, and reactions of the other person.

In order to be innovative you have to Empathetic, both the company and every employee in the company have to be empathic to understand the pain of your users.

So you need to build this culture in the company, when you start practicing then you will realize that it is not easy to create an empathy culture. This has to come inside out because you cant call all your employees and declare that “ from today onwards we are an empathetic company, so from today we will be empathetic”. It is not possible.

When I ask the leaders and management team they all will say that they are empathic. But first, the employees should feel that management is empathetic to them and the leadership team should also have empathy and vision towards “why they are building what they are building”.

That empathy and vision should flow to all the employees. This is not an easy process it takes time, patience, and practice.

Once this is done then you have actually laid the foundation for innovation. Because once you feel the pain of the users you will think about innovative ways to solve that.

Till this point, “you are a group of people who are implementing a solution based on customer’s needs”.

This is the same point where you will transform yourself from a service mindset to a product mindset. That mindset is the key driver for innovation. As I said earlier this is only the foundation and then you have to build on top of this.

So, It’s not the dollars and manpower you need to build a product instead you need “Passion and Empathy”.

https://bivekrenuji.medium.com/innovation-is-passion-driven-not-dollar-driven-8333c07a97a5