Product is not a project!

I was pushed to this article by a big imbalance, which I see in the mass consciousness and the consciousness of the professional community of managers of IT companies. Alas, sites about project management the sea, and about product management - the cat wept.

It is as if there were a sea of ​​books, trainings, entire institutions on how to walk correctly, and not a single brochure on how to choose the direction of the path.

In books on project management (especially for beginners), authors love to begin with the thesis that the world consists of projects, projects everywhere. Prepare a meal - a project, treat a doctor - a project, pick your nose or make love, even a vacation - all projects.
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Of course, in everyday life the musician also hears music everywhere, the cameraman builds a frame, and the hairdresser identifies people by hairstyle. But with design thinking and design terminology, the world has gone crazy too far.

Then I will give a few examples of what this may threaten you.


Starting another adventure, we say that we are starting a project. Telling a friend about a website, we call it a project. At the interview we talk about the projects on which we worked.

Projects include organizations, inventions, houses, steamboats, musical and various groups, artistic works, films, software, documents, illustrations, and much more.

Behind a simple text change, there is often a time bomb, explicitly or implicitly, hidden, the root of which is a change in meaning and perception .

Likbez

What is a project? A project is an activity (process) defined by three main properties:

1. Time - when the project starts and ends
2. Predefined goal - what result should be obtained by the end of the project, for which the project is being started
3. Resources - what kind of people, for what money and how they will work to achieve the goal

If there is not even one of these signs, we have anything, but not a project.

What is a product? A product is something (often the result of someone's labor) that is sold, bought and used.

Even simpler: a project is a process , a product is a result .

So what ?!

We (people, organizations with which and in which I worked, about whose work I know not by hearsay) all too often pay excessive attention to the process, and not to the final result. Without a good process it is difficult to get a good result, but the result is much more important.

And that's why.

1. Live long and prosper or manuscripts do not burn

Any project always comes to an end. Truly successful products usually outlive their creators (remember Jobs, Disney, the pharaohs with their pyramids, Christ with his teachings, and so on, down to famous scientists, inventors).



Thinking in the project space, you unwittingly set yourself up on the fact that all this will end sooner or later. But with the end of a project in real life, everything is just beginning (if you are not a poor outsourcer who needs to quickly get rid of the next order).

Thinking about the product, you are pushing your brain to look a little further, mentally skipping the process of achieving the result. As if he had already passed.

Something like a boxing technique to aim a blow a little further than the point of contact of the obstacle, as if punching it.

2. Show me the f * cking money!

No one today cries for the unhappy crowds of slaves who died at the construction of the pyramids and other wonders of the world. No one is trying to figure out what the production efficiency was. But everyone admires the result.



No one buys tomatoes for a thousand rubles, if they are sold nearby for the same one hundred. I could not meet the cost price of competitors - you went bankrupt, but these are your problems. A person has always bought and will buy products that are optimal according to his personal criteria for price / quality / satisfaction, having little thought about what process led to this result.

Buy the result.

Arguing about what you do as a product, you often become on the same bank of the river where your customer stands. And more often you ask yourself the key questions (what should the product be? How much should it cost? How do we sell it? Who needs it? Where to develop it?) And adjust your processes for these answers, and not vice versa.

3. The product is specifically

A project can die, barely started, and can last forever, it can be good, bad, frozen, confused, drawn out, interesting, dull, heavy, expensive, difficult, cheap, and often at first cheap and interesting, and then suddenly dull and expensive ...

And the product is either there or not.



A project is an abstraction for a large set of processes; it is a rather subtle and complex matter. It is not just objectively and specifically evaluated, described and managed. For this, there is a separate discipline on the verge of art "project management", and what did you think!

And the product is either there or not. It can be bad, good, successful, buggy, irrelevant, blue, inoperative, gorgeous, etc. With it, too, is not so simple.

But the line between “product is ready” or “not ready” is much clearer. And it gives a much more accurate understanding and appreciation of the world: how well we do the work, we go to the goal. If our ultimate goal is a product.

4. A good project does not guarantee the desired result.

Moreover, sometimes a good result is not due to, but in spite of, the process. One of the reasons for this is the creative nature of the software development process: by internal mechanisms, this is much closer to creating a picture or movie than building standard cottages.

You can take a proven storyline, hire cool specialists, invest a lot of money in promotion and get a complete failure ( one and two times ), or you can create a masterpiece ( one or two ) from scratch.

The danger is that the quality criterion of a project can be the quality of a project - how cool we are to “curse”, how wonderful charts we draw, how well the code is documented and the communication with usability is smartly adjusted.



This may give the false sense that everything is going well. What is moving the right path to the right goal. To think about the goal itself, the product itself is already either too lazy or not at the strategic or tactical level.

Illustrative examples (in addition to the Hollywood ones mentioned above): the Third Reich, the USSR, many Dot-Bubble start-ups, etc.

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It all revolves around one simple observation-output: in fact, the world consists of products. Even you, dear reader, are products of your parents' love.

Remember that in your case it is more important now - the process or the result.