The Pivot

Photo by USGS on Unsplash

Life as a Product

My name is Greg, I’m 64. I Have Always Lived as a Product

I turn 64 this coming January, on the 28th.

Remarkably, it has taken me this long to realise I have all the makings of a Product Manager. As a pivot from using The Garage for developing Cities as a Service business model, this is a natural direction to pursue.

My Journey to this point is why myself and my product will be most valuable hire you will make.
Now, whether you hire us, or not, will depend on whether you want a Copy, or an Original.

We are an Original. Copies are everywhere.

To say we are “product driven” is to say we are Team and Ecosystem driven. Deficiencies in either will greatly, if not fatally, affect the Product’s ability to deliver out in the wild. To wit: Poor Teams + Poor Ecosystems = Poor Products.

Every. Single. Time.

I am here to pitch you on The Garage Product Management System for Discovery and Delivery of Smart Products for a Changing World.

Our Shared Goal here is to have a league leading batting average for moving Ideas to Profit Making Smart Products.

Products and their Productivity in the real world are the only sustainable competitive advantage.
Everything about The Business should be in service of the Twin Ps.
Companies go off the rails when they lose sight of this relationship.

The Garage Product Management System is designed to keep you on the rails for a high performance, Product Driven Business Model.

What follows is a compilation of character, principles, practices, thoughts, philosophies and properties that go into what makes me a great Product Manager and system as a candidate for your organisation.

The Modern Era PM is a more focused version of being an Ecosystem Orchestrator, the role I spent a lifetime developing and defining.
When we explore the characteristics of the high performing PM in today’s fast moving world of digital products and services, what they really are is a Ecosystem Orchestrator.
I strongly believe product driven companies would be greatly advanced if they recognised and supported this emerging reality.

Some Background

Aside from delivering newspapers, my first direct experience with “Production” came at age 15 when my Dad, who was was head of the Mechanical Division, managed to talk Danny DePap, the Field Manager for Operations of Millstream Timber, the logging company for which they were parts of the leadership team, into giving my twin brother and I jobs as “chokermen” in the summer of 1974 . Nixon was still President. Moon landings had become routine.

The job was becoming part of a 4 man team that would deliver logs from the field to a landing area, from which it was loaded onto huge trucks and delivered from there to the ocean to be distributed to lumber and pulp mills the world over. Production wasn’t a ‘thing’, it was the only thing.

At the age of 15, so began my education in the life of a product and the business of product development and delivery.
As did my concept of “Flow” and “Productivity”.
How to work “Smart”.

Two things defined my career development.
1) I needed unlimited growth based on merit, not ladder climbing.
This ruled out a lot of traditional options.
2) I needed to have a deep impact. I wanted to become someone future generations would read about in the history books.
This ruled out the ordinary. The average. The status quo.

The world of construction offered some hope for the first, but not the second.
The 1980’s for me was the search for both.

By the early 1990’s, I ‘settled’ on custom homes, and relatedly, the opportunities that the WWW afforded. I wanted to combine both.
I wanted to use the properties of the WWW (Web1!) to build a “decentralised” home building company” (the original DAO!).
This became an obsession that culminated in a highly advanced “City as a Service” ecosystem business model, tied together with a currency based on Social, Intellectual, Engagement, Reputation and Financial Capitals.

From 1992 on, I spent a LOT of 16 hour days working the craft of delivering a client the most important “product” they purchase: a home designed and built just for them.

Any spare time in the morning, evenings and in the middle of the night went into learning everything one needed to know to design and develop what came to be understood by me as “high performance ecosystems”.
I got my Compuserve account and Internet Appliance (computer) in 1994.

My talents for Product Management were honed the hard way as I “Lived as a Product”. (living the dream is a bit of a stretch of imagination at this point)
I tick all the PM boxes because I had to. Non-ticked boxes proved to have certain “fatalities”, if you know what I mean.

Put another way, building homes and designing high performance, platform based ecosystems, you Eat Your Mistakes.
Corps have the money to paper over their mistakes, I didn’t.

I have never seen myself as an “employee” in any business system, rather a “free agent”. I saw myself as an Agent of Business Delivery.

This is an incredible distinction, as being a Free Agent meant I was also a Product, a Brand.

My neurological equipment for this life as an Agent is based on “ADD” architecture. Neophytes mistake this as an attention deficit disorder.

People who do not understand evolution make this classification error.

This architecture was designed by nature to understand the environment in which it was operating.
‘ADD’ is Exploration and Execution Neuro Architecture and Software.

I am a Specialised-Generalist, with a Range and Depth few can match.
Whether hands on building a custom home, or a platform based ecosystem, you have to have a very good idea of how a lot of ‘things’ go together usefully and consistently.
You need a system. You learn what good ones look like. You learn what bad ones’ feel like.

For digital platforms, there’s around 150 domains of knowledge you have to acquire a strategically useful degree and spectrum of knowledge around.
Learning to Learn is the hallmark of my professional career.

My Life as a Product has been a 49 year journey to the Role of a Lifetime:

the blossoming of my innate ability, field experience, devotion to discovery and delivery of extraordinary products to extraordinary clients.
A Product Manager!

The Foundation of My Practice

Our explicit purpose here is to discover whether my product, The Garage, is the right fit for your business in the delivery of high value Smart Products to the Market in an effective and productive fashion for all those concerned.

We can explore the range and depth for this Product Management Model more broadly on my ‘in-house’ Living the Product, document, but for our purposes here, we will focus on the lessons I’ve learned the hard way through my experiences of building custom homes while simultaneously developing a digital business model for smart swarming collective intelligence using platforms for creating high performance business ecosystems.

This Twin Helix of learning and experiencing allowed me to develop a foundation on top of bedrock for how I approach the 3Ds of Design, Development and Delivery.

This is a partial list of core principles that form the foundations for any system devoted to Product Discovery and Delivery cultivated from 30 years of devotion to the mastery of two particular crafts that combined to amplify my core comprehension of both. An Infinity Loop for Learning.

1. The Foundation: The Core
   Whether you are building a house or a digital platform, the foundation is everything.
   The Core is the Confidence Zone. It is where we create a Core Charter encapsulating all the principles and practises the product will require to excel in the field.
   For all product ramp ups, I talk about The Foundation a lot. This is because screwing up the foundation is the worst mistake that can be made in any endeavour.
   A lot has been written and preached about starting with the customer and working back to the product from there.
   This is a mistake.
   It has to begin in the field and the possibilities adjacent in those fields. Put another way, The Environment in Which the Product must Produce. Any journey that does not begin here is unnecessarily walking blindly into ambiguity and complexity that will increase the odds of product disappointment, outright failure, or not even getting it out the door, the poor fledgling product dying a painful death on the shop floor due to our ignorance of the environment in which our baby was meant to excel. An unnecessary burn rate. Ouch.
   This is cruelty.
   I can’t do it.
   It is only with a high level of “Street Smarts” that we can confidently build and sign off on the Core Charter that forms the DNA of the Product’s Journey to a Productive Life.
   This is our job. We birth High Impact Products into Live Action Fields.
   I think we can all agree, if we do not have a system for understanding the field of service, our odds diminish for our Products to go out and deliver extraordinary value.
   Let’s be good parents.
2. Teams & Ecosystems
   Everything I have done to deliver value for 49 years has been directly dependent on the quality of Teams and Ecosystems. I am an expert in both.
   How I made my living mostly depended on a very high degree of combining physical labour, intellectual and social capital, engagement, reputation, financing, networks, ecosystems and performance management along with understanding the business cases for which I was involved.
   I learned relatively quickly the pain and suffering for deficiencies in these areas. Some lessons come harder than others.
   Deficient Teams and Ecosystems are a guaranteed path to failure, disappointment, poor performance and deteriorating mental health and well-being.
   Birthing a Product into the market without providing it with high performing teams and ecosystems is just cruel. A lot of companies seem okay with this. Not Me. I won’t do it. I’ve devoted my life to understanding how to design systems to get these right, I see no purpose or advantage in doing it wrong.
   I think we can all agree that the act of forming the Foundation Charter becomes the Act of forming high performance Teams and Ecosystems.
   This is our business responsibility.
3. Teams and Ecosystems: My Basic Criteria
   I will either be the best Product Manager you ever worked with, or the most painful depending on how well you fit my criteria.
   My job begins with getting all people involved in birthing extraordinary products into the “Omg, that was the best experience of my life!” zone.
   Like winning the Stanley Cup. I call this zone the “G-Spot”.
   — ->The Give a S**t Factor (GaSF)
   This is Numero Uno. We cannot reach extraordinary without this essential ingredient. Competence without it is the Road to Average.
   I can’t compromise on the GaSF criteria.
   — ->Street Smarts
   This should be obvious, but it’s more than worth defining. This is someone who has the skills to excel in a wide range of environments. Natural learners, attractors, collaborators, enterprising, creative and innovative, we tend to recognise ourselves readily. My rule of thumb is teams and ecosystems populated by at least 70% Street Smarts have the best odds of delivering.
   — ->Chemistry and Flow
   Talent, as Geoff Colvin has researched, is “Overrated”.
   I make this distinction early on in any endeavour I intend to take on.
   Don’t get me wrong, talent is Important. But not defining. Talent alone does not win championships.
   Chemistry is something we work on a lot. Some of this occurs naturally, some of it is alchemy. We practice to play.
   Flow is the ultimate metric, from “Ideaflow” (Utley and Klebahn) right through to the product in the market, Flow is Everything.
   Friction sucks. It does have its purpose, but that’s only through design as part of feedback loops. (that transfer zone Marty Cagan has between “Discovery” and “Delivery”) Friction that only results in “lost energy” is to be eliminated.
4. Swarm Intelligence
   I’ll keep this brief. We live, design and deliver in a world of unimaginable complexity which hides “the unknown unknowns”.
   For our “world”, this is no other intelligence.
   Does your intelligence matter? For sure it does.
   But our intelligence is what makes The Difference over time.
   Swarm Intelligence is non-negotiable.
   Anything less is Second Rate.
   If a firm wants to run its show on “Big Dick Cowboys”, that is their business.
   It’s not mine. If we want Smart Products that define the market, Swarm Intelligence is the only way to hit that mark consistently. Anything less is just a plain, stupid choice.

While we are still a ways away from how we practise Product Management on The Garage floor, I find if we get the four above right, our odds of getting everything else right goes up substantially.

Skills, Toolkits, Properties: Greg’s Product Features

Okay, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek.
This section is the basis for a few books.

I’ll shoot for the Cole’s Note version.

A quick note. Ben “The Hard Things About Hard Things” Horowitz, when CEO at Opsware, called the Product Manager the “CEO of the Product”.
I concur, with a significant modifier.
I see the role as the Chief Executive Orchestrator of the Product.
This captures the realities of the role and the degree of responsibility and accountability as mentioned near the top.

Ecosystem Orchestration is hands down the most valuable skill in the world today.
We’ll visit this assertion often!

Product Managers in this system (and mind) are Ecosystem Orchestrators.
We are conducting a symphony of a mind-boggling array of moving parts and people in taking “ideas” through our shop and out onto the street where they are making money.

Tens of thousands of hours building people’s custom homes and tens of thousands of hours into a network model for designing and developing High Performance Ecosystems gives one a pretty awesome “bag of tricks”.

Skills

• Learning how to Learn.
• Team building
• Talent Development
• Relations: Dialogue and Communication. Trust.
• Leading in Complex Environments & Networks
• Stakeholder Management
• Decision Making
• Critical Thinking
• Problem Solving
• Ecosystematic Thinking (the evolution of systems thinking)
• Conceptual Development
• Emotional and Situational Intelligence (reading the room)
• Cognitive Agility
• Pace

ToolKit

• Business Models
• Complex Adaptive Systems
• Networks, Platforms, Ecosystems
• Domain Knowledge Topography
• Data Economics
• Digital Development Properties
• The Fourth Economy (Paradigm shifts)
• Innovation
• Economics
• Geopolitics
• Strategy in Networks, Platforms and Ecosystems
• Business Library and Reference Materials

Applicable Properties

• SmartSwarms Proformance Equosystems
• The Infinity Cycle Engine
• Eighteen Tables Ecosystem Mapping
• City as a Service Ecosystem: Solutions at the Speed of Life
• T19 Core for Ecosystem Orchestration
• The Garage

I have always invested in understanding the business case for the business I am in.

This is the one aspect of my full range is understanding the bigger picture of our business and the environment it operates in.

This is the main purpose of all my high performance ecosystem designs.

As an Ecosystem Orchestrator, strategy in networks is the essential skill and purpose of this role.

In this regard, this makes me a particular high value asset.

The rate of return on digitally intelligent products and services is the only sustainable competitive advantage.

Being a product driven company is essential to thrive in the Age of Networks, Platforms and Ecosystems. Companies that cannot excel in this digital environment will lose their customers who master this new economic reality.

I’ve done the research on my own dime and time.

Products will both drive this change and be shaped by this change.

The Infinity Cycle Engine was designed as the power behind this rapid rate of product and customer evolutionary feedback loop.

This next generation of the Web will have an extraordinary impact on the way we live, create, work and play.

Let’s be extraordinary together.

To those who shape the future goes the spoils.

In Closing

By design, my hope is that my product pitch goes a long way for helping us to decide if we are meant for each other in the trials and tribulations of bringing Extraordinary Products that Thrive into the Market.

One last thing you need to understand about me is this:

I play for Championships, not money.

Championships to me would be to have “Trophies” of Extraordinary Products Thriving in the Market.
If we play for Championships, the money part looks after itself.

Compensation
A formula of how my value for winning Championships is factored into the “Big Picture” of the employing firm.
I pride myself on “earning my keep”. I need the CEO to appreciate this.