Product making

In the past few months I have been admiring the importance of product making, yes I don't like to refer to it as product management because it makes little sense to manage a product even when adding new features to an existing product.

It's one thing to have an idea for a product and to have the capability to implement it but it's a totally different ballgame to "make" a product. I have found that it's more so in the case of a business to consumer idea compared to a business to business idea. Even though I have mostly worked on b2c projects all these years I could only understand it better when a few of us tried to put together an implementation for a b2c idea recently. I used to think that being able to implement what we want is the key and as long as we can do that quickly we should be good. I think it's still true however there's something more challenging in addition to that - having a complete vision of the exact usage sequence of the product. Knowing what needs to happen from step 0 to step n precisely, can drive one crazy.

For developers it's easy to know this from the architecture/development perspective - things like what should happen on the device, what should happen on the cloud etc. But it's not easy from the business/consumer perspective. It's amazing how many times we can go back on a flow and come up with some other option - this essentially means we don't know exactly what we want to build!

Hence I have a new found respect for product making. I am thinking that it must feel like heaven to know what precisely needs to be done in order to make a product that the users would die to use :)