Product management goes open source

One of the hardest parts about launching a new product is knowing what prospective customers want to buy. Sure, some companies like Apple can impose their product visions on the public, but most vendors need to fulfill pre-existing product requirements, not create new ones. For everyone but Apple open source offers a great way to perform product management.

When I was working on my juris doctorate, I signed up to be a guinea pig for Microsoft. (It's not as bad as it sounds.) The company would send people out to my house to observe me using my computer, and to ask me questions about changes I'd like to see in various product categories. In return, Microsoft gave me free software.

This is the sort of product marketing/management that most software vendors do. Focus groups, interviews, surveys, etc., form the basis of the product requirements documents (PRDs), which are then used to build products.

Open source may provide a better, more efficient way. As Stephen Walli puts it:

Open source software is a key economic driver from an engineering efficiency and software reuse perspective, but it also opens new opportunities and additional tools for product management to engage better with customers and improve both the top line and the bottom line.

By providing free access to one's product, coupled with the ability to modify it to suit one's needs, open source enables users to describe exactly what they'd buy from the original developer of the open-source project.

My employer, Alfresco, provides an example. The company was founded to provide an open-source alternative to incumbent vendors in the enterprise content management (ECM), Web content management (WCM), and records management (RM) markets. For years, our marketing has targeted buyers in these markets, pitching a low-cost, high-value alternative to proprietary ECM/WCM/RM.

Our customers didn't get the memo. While we were talking about ECM, many of the roughly 30,000 people downloading the product every month were using it as a foundation upon which to build their own applications, most of which would never be classified as ECM. They were creating their own category of infrastructure/middleware, using our technology.

The content application server was born, and we almost missed it, despite the fact that it was happening with our code. We were so busy marketing our vision that we almost missed listening to our users' vision(s). This new vision on an old way of using our product will significantly impact everything we do for years to come.

This is a major opportunity for open-source vendors. As Vinnie Mirchandani (@dealarchitect) suggests, "strategic apps are being custom built" by enterprise IT, not IT vendors. Increasingly, as Stan Rose, managing director, technology risk management, Bank of New York Mellon, told me a few years back, open source is the innovation platform upon which such strategic applications are built.

This is great news, because it means open-source companies, if they listen to their users, are well-positioned to build platforms that can become the lifeblood of enterprise IT. ReadWriteWeb rightly concludes that Twitter's "success has been credited to its ability to transform from a basic life streaming service into a platform," with an outsized, $1 billion valuation to match.

Few open-source companies wouldn't salivate to have the same valuation.

Redmonk's James Governor defines this platform opportunity in the context of "tools," but I think we're talking about the same thing. Open-source companies and communities have the potential to deliver an exceptional platform experience, one built on "tools" in Governor's sense of the word, provided they listen to their users to know what sort of "tools" to build.

There are billions to be made. It's just a matter of listening.

[danielwsmithee]

I really don't think Apple imposes their product vision on the world. They are just much better at product management then other companies are. They understand that releasing a product that does not bring change to the marketplace by solving an existing problem is not a good business decision.

iPhone -> Realized that the software running on most mobile phones was horrible and brought a solution.
iPod/iTunes -> Makes purchasing managing, and bringing your music with you easy.
iMac -> Recognized that many people hate how ugly, and complicated their computer is.

The true talent of Steve Jobs is not his engineering or business skills. Ultimately he has succeeded at Apple because he is a master product manager.

Apple does not uses different methods to manage products then most companies though ... maybe that is why they are so good at it. To them the team working on the product is the customer, if they product they are making can make their life better then it will also make others life better. Apple has better practice to allow their development teams to evolve and create products.

I like to read this blog about product management, great insight http://www.goodproductmanager.com/

[beesh]

This is a very narrow view for software only products. And there is a lot more to PM than PRD's. How about pricing, promotion, competitive analysis, business cases, sales support?

[Matt Asay]

Good points, and you're right. I think open source also helps with those other things, but that's another post.

[Aaron Kempf]

ipod / itunes-- uh winamp made it easy. itunes made it drm infected-- not an option for people who love freedom.

imac- no- it has a 4% marketshare; so sorry that you're a machead, that doesn't mean _ANYONE_ else is.

iphone - software runnning on my blackberry allows me to type emails faster and more accurately than your touch screen.

So sorry that you're slanted-- maybe you should learn how to use computers instead of just blindly buy products from the AOL of the 21st century (Apple)

[danielwsmithee]

Winamp was a great player for a long time, until it hit 3.0 then it became bloated crapware. It did nothing to solve 1) obtaining media in an easy manner, 2) organizing the media (so manny people spend hours just moving files around on their Hard Drive to organize their music collection), or 3) making it easy to move media to a paired player. The iPod/iTunes is one product, and was not successful until both sides of the product were in place.

4% Market share is still huge, especially for a single product. Apple was a company on the verge of collapse until a few well thought out products brought them back to life (OS X, iMac, iPod/iTunes, and iPhone).

Yes you can type a little faster on your blackberry, that is a great hardware feature. As a good product manager Apple was smart enough to recognize that competing in the market based on text entry was not wise, because that need in the market had already been filled. There was a huge whole in the market for a phone that was great for a consumer looking to manage media content, browse the web, and make phone calls. Many of my friends have blackberries. When we're out and they wan't to look up something on the web they always ask to use my iPhone. The blackberry still has no match for the app store.

Apple also is smart enough to realize that market share means nothing (something AOL never understood). Apple chooses their markets to enter very carefully and only enters them if they can make a healthy profit (which is the correct goal for a company), which is exactly why Apple does not make a generic Mac desktop.

[Karl_J]

Ironic that your highly slanted post derides having a slant. Surely just an indication of your wittiness, no?