FEATURE : INNOVATION
IF YOU WANT TO DEVELOP A REALLY HEALTHY , REALLY STRONG ORGANISATION , YOU WANT YOUR BEST PEOPLE TO BE COMPLETELY FREE AGENTS TO JUMP IN WHEREVER THEY ARE NEEDED . product companies may take their eye off simplicity and ease of use for their customers and fall prey to increasing complexity and product sprawl .
“ Product sprawl is not okay , and another one of my jobs is to keep pushing against it ,” says Colgrove .
There are two ways of managing product complexity and ensuring simplicity and ease of use . One part is pushing the engineers and the product managers to be willing to think more radically about how to consolidate it .
And the other part of it is just pushing , product management and engineering to not blindly do what the customers are asking for , because customers have a habit of asking for what they have . If product management and engineering believe their products are simpler and easier to use than competitors , why do you want to just blindly listen to customers ?
“ One of the biggest functions that I have to do is , I have to make sure I know what is going on with the engineering organisations so that I can help them advocate for that stuff ,” explains Colgrove .
“ I am an engineer at heart and I talk to a lot of people and that is especially true in the engineering organisation . And one of the things I always ask all of the engineering groups is who are the people who are speaking up . And I will tell them , one of the reasons you are meeting with me is I heard that you like to speak up a lot and I want to encourage you to keep doing it ,” he adds .
Colgrove feels the day employees stop caring enough to speak up , the day they do not feel comfortable speaking up , when they see something they can do better , that is a sad day for the company because it means it is doomed .
“ One of my big jobs is to defend the ability of the engineers to be curious and keeping those lines of communication open ,” says Colgrove . “ I cannot ever have any engineer in the company think that somehow I am too important for them to talk to .”
And that is where a lot of companies go wrong . The people that do all the work are the individual contributors . The management teams are there to enable the individual contributors to do the work . And you cannot ever lose that focus . That is another key aspect .
Managing product simplicity and complexity
Under pressure to compete in global and regional markets , as well as embed the latest technologies ,
“ Customers will ask for everything competitors are doing , and will turn us into competitors . It is important when you are talking to a customer to not just listen to what they say , but understand what is behind the question ,” points out Colgrove .
For example , when a customer asks for something to monitor the CPU consumption of arrays , why do they care whether CPUs are 80 % busy or 50 % busy or 10 % busy ?
What they actually want to understand , is whether the array is functioning at its maximum performance or could we get more out of it ? Could I put 20 % more load on the box ? Or could I put 40 % more load on the box ? That is the question they are actually trying to answer .
Product management and engineering people need to understand what is behind the request and try and meet someone ’ s needs in that way . That helps to continuously have a differentiated product and a simpler , more consistent product .
A product may become complex and hard to use by a customer and it works that way because somebody gave them too many controls .
If you have a mobile phone , you want it to make calls , receive calls , and hear them clearly . That is the only thing you care about . Why do you want to make any setting for that ? All you want from the phone is to pick up the strongest signal and give you the best quality phone call . And so if that can be automated , that is better .
“ So we are building our products with that same kind of mindset . We want controls that are simple and we do not want controls that are obvious ,” says Colgrove .
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