“Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”

– General George S. Patton, Jr.

Patton was quite a character. From what I know of him, it sounds like he would have been quite a product manager. He’s the source of countless quotes and advice, but I wanted to talk about the quote above and how I think it applies to product managers in two very important senses.

First, on the receiving end, customers and users will very often try to tell you as product manager *how* your product should work, rather than *what* your product should do. We all have experienced this, as it’s very much human nature to try to envision solutions to problems. But when a product manager focuses on *what* the product should do it’s pretty amazing how many possibilities open up as to how to best solve the problem.

I’ve written elsewhere about the underlying reasons why customers and users really aren’t in a position to come up with a good solution themselves. But the bottom line is that there’s a big difference between customer requirements and product requirements.

What I haven’t yet talked about is the other side of this point, where the product manager tells the UI designers and engineers *how* to design and build the product, rather than telling them *what* the product needs to do. This is an especially common problem with UI design (aka product design, interaction design, or information architecture). This problem is exacerbated by the fact that companies typically have too few design resources, and sometimes the product manager is in fact the only person available to do the interaction design.

Unfortunately, the skills for interaction design are very different from product management, and it’s the rare product manager that’s good at both. Another problem I see that complicates this is that in many companies, the UI design resources are part of a service organization where they’re pulled in “as needed” to help with design after the PRD is complete. The problem here is that this severely limits the contribution of a good designer. They are most valuable very early in the process, when the product manager is working to understand the target market and come up with a solution.

A product manager that a) has a good appreciation for the role of product design; b) in a company that has the product design function staffed and available; and c) where the product manager gives the product designer the latitude to come up with solutions that meet the needs, has a big advantage in coming up with winning products.

Strong product/UI designers are hard to find. In my opinion, there are too few good academic programs turning out too few of these critically important people. But when you do find one, be sure to fully utilize her. Make the designer a key part of your product team, and include her in your customer visits, user profiling, product brainstorming, and in deciding your product strategy and roadmap. Let her explore alternative designs and listen closely to her input in terms of user behavior and preferences.

All of the above applies with engineers as well. The engineering team doesn’t appreciate the product manager spelling out the details of the implementation any more than the product manager wants the customer to dictate the specifics of the requirements. In my experience, this is somewhat less frequent because the line between product managers and engineers is fairly clear, but when I review PRD’s I find that it still happens a great deal.

Note that if you want to learn more about product/UI design, a site and newsletter that I like a lot is www.goodexperience.com written by Mark Hurst. Also, one of my favorite books on this topic is “The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore the Sanity” by Alan Cooper.

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If you have been wondering what’s going on with all these startups with 20-something founders and product leaders, you’re not alone. There are some great companies that have been started by some very young people, several of whom dropped out of college to pursue their ideas. I’ve talked earlier about the value of experience, but in this note I’d like to talk about the problem I see of people discounting product leaders because of their youth.

In truth, I think there are outstanding product leaders across the age spectrum. But how is it that someone can be only 25 years old and an exceptional product leader? First, remember that the Internet has really only been around since 1995 or so, so anyone who today is 24 or older probably has about the same amount of experience online as the rest of us. And people that were in their teens during the rise of the Internet grew up taking for granted technologies that many are still trying to figure out. Further, while experience can play an important role and naturally develops over time, other traits like innate intelligence and product passion are not a function of our chronological age.

I personally had to get used to the idea of working for someone in their early 20’s when I worked for Marc Andreessen at Netscape. But I quickly forgot about how old he was once I started seeing how quickly he was absorbing the new technologies and assimilating the literally thousands of customer visits he was doing. Anyone just listening to him would assume he was at least in his 40’s.

But what this is really about is finding great product people – regardless of their age, gender or race. I’m not here to talk about the moral issues involved in the different forms of discrimination, but I do want to talk about the business issues. I believe there are still stereotypes and biases that get in the way of companies creating the best product teams and products possible. In his new book “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell makes a similar point (among several other very useful points for product managers).

One reason I love the Bay Area so much is because we're so diverse. At the typical Silicon Valley tech company, within a single product team you’ll typically find males and females, straight and gay, Caucasian, Chinese, Indian, and Russian. But even in the most progressive of companies I think there are often hiring biases based on our mental image of a great product leader. For example, we know that communication skills are essential for a strong product manager, so we sometimes look for someone with native English language skills, even though others that may be much stronger have more than passable language skills.

I point this out not to chastise anyone but just to try to make us aware that we might be missing some truly outstanding product leaders by unintentionally restricting our view of what makes a great product manager and where great product ideas come from. So the next time that 22 year old college hire comes to you with a product idea, you may want to listen. Her idea might be the next Facebook.

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