Teague Hopkins

Mindful Product Management

Technology

Measuring Productivity

When you zoom out, the measure of productivity often changes.

Photo by Neys
  • For a single-minded programmer, productivity might be lines of code committed.
  • For a development team, productivity might be working code.
  • When you zoom out to a product view, working code that implements a feature no one uses is waste, but implementing features that people use is productivity.
  • Zoom out further to a business level, and it’s not just about using the feature, it’s about that feature making the customer more likely to pay for your service or product.
  • Zoom out again to an ecosystem (or, for you MBAs, value chain/system) level, and it’s not just about what people will pay for, but what adds value to their lives. And not just any value, but adds more value than the cost of providing said value. (N.B.: people are not rational actors, and will sometimes pay for things that don’t add value to their life.)

Now we’re in the realm of things that are hard to measure. And zooming out once again to a global level doesn’t make it any easier. What does productivity look like on a global scale? Even if we are creating value for people at a direct cost lower than the amount of value produced, are we factoring in the negative externalities to our productivity? If we are introducing pollutants, or stress, or social inequality into the world, are we truly being productive?

I don’t have the answers, but I’d love to start a conversation.

The Biggest Mistake Entrepreneurs Make

The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is building their product before finding out if people want it.

I was working on a company last year to develop a product to help small business owners start leveraging social media and the web without spending hours on them. We had the business plan and the feature list. We had plenty of people telling us it was a great idea.

Notecards galoreAbout the time we were planning to start development, I attended Lean Startup Machine in Boston, a weekend-long competition where teams try to create a business, prove the market, and achieve revenue by the end of the weekend using Eric Ries’s lean startup method. The opportunity to practice lean startup hands-on crystallized a set of assumptions that had nagged me for months.

After the conference we started talking to people who weren’t social media experts or small business experts. We talked to people who could conceivably become our customers some day and asked them if they would pre-order the service. Over and over we got the same response: small business owners who needed web presence help didn’t want a tool that made creating and managing it easier; They wanted guidance from someone who could walk them through the process, and they wanted someone else to worry about all the technical details.

We had identified a valid problem, but our solution didn’t fit the market. So we pivoted.

We cancelled development of the product and migrated to a services model instead. We still help businesses create and handle their web presences, but instead of building tools that none of them wanted, we guide them through the process and take care of all the technology so our clients can focus on running their business.