Larry McKeogh attended the inaugural ProductCamp Utah on September 10th. Ryan Money (@rmoney) gave a keynote called “Because Kills.” Frankly, I found myself skeptical of his content for the first 10 minutes of the talk. It was very entertaining, but wasn’t sure how it related to Product Management. Then he hit the nerve. In the video below Ryan addresses the situation that product managers sometimes have to deal with [07:30]. Development comes back with something “horrible.” Digging into this:
Q: Why do we do it this __________ way?
A: Because. Because that is how we’ve always done it.
If you stop at because and you don’t keep on drilling into that then you won’t realize the innovation.
Due to time limitations on YouTube, I had to split this into two sections. Total time = 22 minutes. Total presentation time was close to an hour. Second part is below. I encourage you watch it as well.
The big take-away from the second video was a quote from Jeff Bezo’s on having a product fail.
On the day you decide to give up on it [project], what happens? Your operating margins go up because you stop investing in something that wasn’t working. Is that really such a bad day?” [04:30]
In the end, Ryan did a great job of tying it all together. In summary for the talk [10:15]:
- Think outside the box
- Take passion and reward people trying and giving it their best
Are you making a point to remember this in your daily activities? When was the last time you questioned the status quo?