🎲 — mikrobloggeriet iterate — iterate-1 · iterate-2
Finally I found a term that feels like home. Listening to Ezra Kleins conversation with Adam Moss yesterday made me think that what my job really is about is finding the right product fit through editing. I never found that the term “product manager” fit me, it sort of denoted a very stringent approach to making a product work. All numbers and structure.
Which is kinda why my design career ventured towards products in the first place, exactly because I missed a greater focus on knowing that I contributed to a better world for users.
Coming from design I often lend an eye to the many great tools in the design thinking toolbox, too. Tools that tend to veer toward creativity and ways to understand what users actually want. The combination is golden.
But, there is also another component to building products that I less often hear about. Much of my work is actually feeling my way into what might fit the end user. Based on numbers and insights, definitely, but often I cannot explain exactly why one solution feels better than the next.
Hence my liking for the term product editor, I guess. Especially from the context Adam Moss talks about editing. With the term “product editor”, it feels like getting an “OK” to using my many years of experience building products, without having to explain everything in detail. I can be more fierce in believing in the vision or our direction, whilst hopefully be better at avoiding design by consensus or pure logic. Which is where I sometimes find myself, not being particularly happy about it.
Perhaps this term will also help our clients understand that making products isn’t purely a numbers game, or a straight puck. It is about vision, execution and measuring impact all at once.
I love Adam Mosses description of the creative process amongst the many artists he has interviewed to find in which ways they make decision when making art. The artists stories are very individual, yes, but they go through a similar top level process. I think we could be better at doing something closer to this. The three steps are (my translation):
Being pretty good at the first and last, I find we very often don’t focus specifically on the middle one. This part is absolutely essential to find an emotional fit for users—which is really what we’re always searching for. We want to make products that people love (not accept or like).
I think perhaps we are also terrified at the prospect of someone being offended as we critique their/our work. So, naming this stage as key would potentially make it less of a painful process to really edit our products as we wade through customer insights, hypotheses, ideas and aha-moments. I guess I want the ability to really look at our work, judge it well until we get to the point where we can truly be proud to have created a product that makes people go WOW!
I have now changed my title to product editor.
—Kjersti