Getting your "timing" right in product management is one of the most critical ingredients to success

As product managers, we often talk about roadmapping, prioritization, product specs… but all of those concepts are kind of meaningless if you don’t get your timing right.

What does it mean to get your timing right? Ans: Your customers are READY and ABLE to use your product.

Now, you’re probably thinking that if you’re following product management 101 concepts, you should be able to avoid situations where “timing” isn’t right, but some of the greatest minds in our industry make this mistake.

Think Google Glass! Or within B2B SaaS, there are many examples of products who are doing super well today that existed 10 years ago but just didn’t hit traction.

So when thinking about product management, it’s not just about the tactical “jobs to be done”, it’s also whether or not your customers are ready and able to do the job. The problem is the art of turning a “problem” into a “solution” skips the question of whether or not the problem is ready to be solved in the first place! So before going ahead with building a larger product line, make sure you ask yourself the following…

Are your customers READY and ABLE to use your product?

What factors go into READY and ABLE?

• Market dynamics - is what you’re working on becoming a trend? Don’t underestimate the power trends have in providing rocket fuel for your product

• Customer “ability” - do your customers have the level of training they need to get the most out of your product? A great example of this is something like Webflow. That product, despite being “no-code”, is pretty complex to use. Does your target persona have the ability to use it?

• Customer sentiment - do your customers think what you’re working on is critical? Do they need a solution now, either to compete with their competitors or to fuel their business?

• Customer “state of the world” - does your customer have all the requirements needed to be successful with your product? For example, if you’re building an analytics product, do they have the right data warehouse setup?

It’s possible to try to create the above on your own. Maybe you can create a market dynamic via brand marketing. Maybe you can train customers so that they know how to use your product. Maybe you can convince customers that they need what you need now with stellar positioning and sales people. Maybe you can build the “state of the world” you need to get customers to success.

But with all startups, it’s about time, money, and talent. Does you team have the time, money, and talent to get there?

Let’s talk through some real-life examples where timing came in as a factor for whether or not to build a feature. At one of my prior startups, I was working on a feature called CDC (change data capture). This was an important feature to have because in your transactional databases, sometimes you want to pipe the history of your transactional database into analytical databases to power downstream BI or data science. The “job to be done” was clear, and we had several customers asking for it. And! It was something they wanted out of a database.

However, we decided at the time to postpone working on it in favor of a different feature that was more core to the database. This was years ago at this point, but the rationale was clear. Startups don’t have unlimited time or money, so you need to pick the right things to build at the right time. At the time, we were still an early stage startup, and although CDC was super cool, it wasn’t the right time.

Let’s go through the “Ready and Able” factors:

• Market dynamics - although some users were asking for CDC, the market wasn’t SCREAMING for it. At the time, Kafka was king.

• Customer “ability” - yes, the customers we spoke to were familiar with the feature.

• Customer sentiment - although critical, it wasn’t a blocker as there were other reasons why customers were not adopting. Also, many of these customers were already using the database for certain use cases, even if they couldn’t use CDC.

• Customer “state of the world” - not yet, customers were still adopting the database itself vs using advanced features.

So you can see that although it was a great idea, it didn’t really hit all the “Ready and Able” characteristics.

Now an important thing to note about “Ready and Able” is that different customer segments are ready at different times. Early adopters will be ready to adopt something when lagging enterprises are not. What is important is whether or not you believe that the cohort of “Ready and Able” customers is large enough to go after.

So next time, when thinking of whether or not to build a feature, don’t forget the importance of timing! Your customers need to be both ready and able to use your product, and if they aren’t, it’s an uphill climb to get them there.