In my previous post, I wrote about my surprise upon learning that the vast majority of my developer and development manager friends believe they have a “clear vision” of who their product actually serves as well as how their product is actually used. There were two other important questions in my survey, which asked if the respondent had:
- A solid understanding of their product’s special niche in the market
- A clear vision of how their product will mature over time.
It turns out that a slight majority of my techie friends believe they know their product’s special niche in the market while only a very small minority believe they have a clear vision of how their product will mature over time.
Ok, I get the product niche result. I agree that most developers know at least a part of their product niche. Approximately 60% of the techies said they know their product’s niche. My personal bias – based on 20 years of development experience – is that they probably know about 60% of their niche. For example, when I worked at Cisco Systems, I was told that our niche was the fact that our software ran on Cisco routers, the best name in internet infrastructure. Perhaps that was all there was to know? But I suspect there was more, or should have been more.
Still, it’s the responses to the roadmap question that floored me. I spent some time puzzling it out. I couldn’t understand why techies would say they don’t have a good vision of how the product matures over time. After all, the techies are the people who see the requirements, give estimates on implementation, make the design decisions and actually do the coding. As the people who implement the product, there are only a few people in a company more powerful at affecting the product than the developers. How can they not have a vision of how their product will mature?
Of course, being a developer can be incredibly frustrating at times. Feature requirements grow and shrink, and sometimes seem to be made-up. Schedules and priorities change on a daily. Managers and co-workers (and their opinions, biases and methods) come and go, sometimes with great force. A developer can feel quite powerless in that surf. However, a truth behind that dynamic is that the developer is more plugged into the priorities of their company and the future of their product than almost anyone else. The developer may know nothing about the next big sales deal, but if he doesn’t know how his product will mature, who does?
This thought probably leads to some reason for the survey results: Even though developers have a better sense than most of how their product will mature over time, they obviously don’t actually know how it will mature. They know that whatever features they start to implement will change. They know that even seemingly small requests from the company often have significant implementation ramifications, which then leads to the company making different feature requests. Furthermore, my survey asked if they had a “clear vision” for the future of the product, not just some vision. With all the shifting demands that occur during any development project, my techie friends are completely reasonable to say they are unclear about the future direction of their product.
Still, the survey results are surprising. Why? Because it’s these same techies who aren’t clear about their product roadmap who are very clear about their product’s users and its actual use. So, either my techie friends spend a lot more time with the users and at customer sites than I did as a programmer and project manager, or they’re overlooking the complexity of real users and real environments.
Does the shoe fit?
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