Throughout my career I never experienced a company with a product development process working as described in product management books. In larger companies there was often a specification – quite hard to follow and mostly ignored. In smaller startups, everyone just worked in an established way of doing things that brought their particular product to a success.

At first I didn’t get it why people ignore the best practices – there are so many shiny frameworks for product discovery and delivery, why not using Jobs-to-be-done, or Design Thinking, or Product-Led Growth, or OKRs? But after the time has passed, I learned to take every technique with a grain of salt, since frameworks in product management are way more loosely defined and validated than in computer science or other natural sciences, and their application is limited.

No hard principles

My expectations were that if something is included in a book and praised by experts, than it’s scientifically proved and works as described. But it turned out to be a typical halo-effect. The reality is no one actually comes up with a hypothesis and runs repeated tests to gather enough data.

Probably the reason is that building products has more in common with an art than a science – there’s no equivalent of Newton’s law, no persistent rules like gravity, so coming up with a theory is a waste of time.

So, whenever you hear about the new shiny thing – apply your critical thinking and remember that it’s based on one, may be a few cases, and there’s no way to prove it’s 100% valid.

Organisational and cultural impact

Another thing that is partially related to the general lack of hard principles is the cultural difference – what works and what doesn’t hugely depends on the environment, how people used to plan and execute.

I once worked in the environment that praised visionary approach, complexity and thoroughness, and there were constant long and abstract discussions before any initiative. In such culture you can’t expect to successfully use quick Hypothesis-Action-Data-Insights approach, because you will be constantly dragged into conversations before you even have a chance to start.

The opposite example is the culture where everyone praises “move fast and break things” approach – here you are completely fine with rough experiments and iterations, but no one will be interested in your documents on user personas, or PR FAQs, or any other thoughtful and complex frameworks.

Customer habits

Not only frameworks work differently across different companies and teams, but they are also impacted by the established behaviour of customers and markets.

Let’s take Viral loops in B2B industry as an example. A typical guide on how to create a viral loop is – get some first customers, create an incentive and tools for them to share your product, and wait for new customers to pick it up.

This approach sounds and works great for tech-savvy customers with established communities – engineers, influences, marketers, ecommerce sellers. But if you take any area where people are naturally more conservative, or their main focus is craft or day-to-day operations – barbers, writers, lawyers, restaurant owners – you will face significant challenges.

Conclusion

To summarise, my current point of view is – don’t confuse means and ends, and don’t try to build your work around frameworks. Instead, focus on fundamentals and try to come up with your own way of creating value.

Link to the article inspiring this post: https://every.to/napkin-math/product-led-growth-s-failure