Creativity is Overrated and Misapplied
There seems to be a notion that creative people make better product managers. That they can just think of a wonderful product and build it.
It’s partly true. Creativity is a wonderful, very-human, trait that can help anything and everything. Any task can be done better by using some out-of- the box thinking and continuously innovating to see if better solutions are available.
However, I think creativity is overestimated and misapplied in the product management process. Let me explain both.
Overestimated Creativity
Consider the problem of what to build? Let’s assume that the seemingly mundane process of prioritization of ideas and their orchestration is robust enough. If so, all you have to do is to fill the funnel with the universe of all possible ideas related to that feature or product. The process itself will direct you to the best possible outcome. So how to you generate these hypothesis to take through the process? Some will say that the most efficient way is to think of the things that would make for a great product and focus on those things.
I humbly submit that user interviews, customer feedback, feedback from sales and support teams, competitive analysis, a rigorous analysis of user modes, user persona and user stories, and other commonly used techniques are better sources of these hypotheses. Creative ideation definitely has a role to play, but I have seen people come up with ideas, get attached to them, assume that these are the only or the best ideas available, ignore the proper analysis and end up with subpar products. I call this Smart Person Fallacy (see the second point in the list of mistakes I have made).
On the other hand if you are speaking to enough people and are doing enough research then some pesky notions will refuse to die, and they may end up being the critical thing that makes your product successful.
Long Tail Ideas
A big source of such hypotheses that many PMs, yours truly included, largely ignore is managing the long-tail ideas. How many times have you met a colleague who has some random suggestion about how you could do your job better? Maybe you’re focused on something else at that time, or maybe you are at the stage where that particular idea may not be useful immediately, but there’s always something to those ideas. Similarly, how many times has a customer told you what they would like to see in the product? Again, those things may not be on your roadmap in the short term, but they can be very valuable. Then there is the reviews your customers leave for your product — they are literally telling you what you need. Alas, most teams I have been part of are not equipped to handle qualitative reviews.
In this era of generative AI, the long-tail nature of such feedback and its fragmentation can no longer be an excuse. In fact it is my personal growth target for 2024. Even without access to fancy AI tools, a simple Google Form often does wonders.
Misapplied Creativity
So is there any room for creativity? Oh, of course. A huge one. While most people think of creativity as the force behind product features or UX designs there are two areas where it can be applied much better.
The most important and the most frequent decisions a product manager makes are choices, mostly binary. Which of the two features is a higher priority? Which solution should they try first? Which persona should they build for? In many cases the choices are really obvious e.g. let’s go after $1 billion TAM vs. a $10 million one, but often the choices are hard. People have written tomes on how to make these hard choices and this is truly where a good product manager’s skill outshines.
With experience , though, PM’s learn that hidden somewhere between the two hard choices is always a third one that is better than either on the table. All it takes is some deliberate thought and, you got it, creativity. A team with consistent commitment to creatively expanding the scope of available solutions will always outrun others in discovery, innovation and execution.
There is another way creativity can be useful: in prioritization. Here’s how. Old school product management says, very rightly so, that plot every task on an Effort-Impact axis and then knock off Low-High ones. Next, think about relative importance of all the Low-Low and High-High tasks before you look at Low -High ones. This is a time tested way to do it.
Great PMs, however, follow a principle — there should be no High Effort tasks in your list, period. (see 2x2 Prioritization is All Wrong, the eighth point). The ideal scenario is to break down all High Effort tasks to a series of Low Effort ones, so that you can deliver something every sprint. This simple idea takes a lot of innovative thinking in real life. To come up testable deliverables for every sprint for a monolithic task is deceptively complex, and this is where creativity helps a lot.
If you got anything from this article, it’s that don’t trust single opinions, not yours, definitely not others’, and instead rely on data and a wide range of inputs. In my opinion, though, creativity has a big role to play in the product process, just not in the way many would assume.
