A Christmas Carol. About Products. Being a Ghost Story about Product Development
By: Stephen Ratcliffe
Tags: Christmas, Product Development, Strategy, Product Design, Product Management

In 1843, Charles Dickens wrote the short-story ‘A Christmas Carol’; a fable highlighting ill-treatment of the poor and the value of family traditions.

As a quick recap, a miserly old man named Scrooge is visited by four ghosts on Christmas Eve — his old business partner, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. The ghosts show Scrooge a different version of past, present and future Christmases that (spoiler alert) encourage him to change his ways and be a better person.

In the spirit of Dickens’ classic, I now present you three vignettes of product development of the past, present and future.

Ghost of Product Past

A mid-level manager of a large corporation is having an evening stroll when he hits upon a great idea for a new product. He quickly draws a sketch in his pocketbook and the next day hands it to his head designer. The designer doesn’t really like the idea but whips up some half-decent sketches to appease the manager. The manager loves them, and he hands them over to his programming team to bring them to life. The lead engineers work with his team in developing a plan to build the product. Six months later the coding is finished, and the product goes through quality assurance to test and remove all bugs. The product is finally launched, 9 months after the initial sketch and $2 million investment later.

One year after the product goes live, it is shut down. It was too difficult to use, and nobody really wanted it anyway. But that’s ok, the manager has a few other bets up his sleeve to try next.

Ghost of Product Present

A product manager is collecting customer feedback and building a lean canvas for a new round of investment. They’d gone out and spoken to 15 customers to discover the major pain points and opportunity areas to pursue. 10 customer interviews were conducted over video calls while 5 were done with our video (aka phone calls). They’ve setup a virtual whiteboard to map out the projects and synthesis the information. Colourful virtual post-its litter the virtual canvas, which now also has illegible virtual notes and scribbles that made sense at 9pm but now appear Picasso-esque.

The ironic thing about product in 2020 is that while organisations have finally seen the value of getting out of the building and talking to customers, COVID-19 has forced us to self-isolate and research from our bedrooms.

Ghost of Product Yet to Come

A ‘product master’ is setting the weekly tasks for her development squad. She programs the items into a software application, which are there assigned to each of the team members. The tasks are targeted to the most appropriately skilled candidate, but others less-skilled are equally available to pick up the slack if need be. The creative tasks go to designsystem_bot7, the programming is assigned to java_bot13, dev-ops tasks go to devo_bot3 and quality assurance will be completed by tester_bot63. The product manager will be on hand to help with any escalations needing manual attention.

In the future, products are now developed by machines. Humans program the machines that themselves then create the products. Humans now act as concierges and complete most of the stakeholder communication tasks — although a robot could probably do a better job if it tried.

As we observe the continuous evolution of product development into the future, it’s valuable to understand how product thinking has changed over time. A pivot from the ways things used to be done, tells a story of the pain points and learnings of countless product skeletons.

I hope this Christmas Ghost story has given you some perspective and food for thought for the year to come.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!