Ed Anuff

I don’t really know Kevin Lynch of Adobe, now Apple, very well. We met a couple of times more than a decade ago, back when he and Jeremy Allaire were at Macromedia and Jeremy was someone I talked to a bit. What I do know of Kevin is that he’s a great technologist who’s made a very significant impact on the evolution of the web. I’ve never met Gruber personally, I know what I read by him and what I read I often don’t like. I use Apple products right now because they’re the best, I’ve stopped using them when they were not the best, and there was a long swath of time when they exceptionally bad on many dimensions, and this wasn’t just while Steve wasn’t there either. Gruber, to the best of my knowledge, has never abandoned Apple, so there might be just a few issues with objectivity on his part.

What I do know about is working in technology and the culture we live in as part of the technology industry. I do know a bit about what it means when you have a product leadership role at a company and what your responsibility is. And that responsibility is that when it comes to the product decisions, you have to own it. So, the Apple/Adobe/Kevin situation is a great case study for thinking about this, with the caveats that I do so purely from a distance and all respect to all involved.

Looking at the situation, there are only three possible ways of considering it:

1. Flash wasn’t all that bad, and he’s proud of his work
2. It was really that bad, and he takes responsibility
3. He was just following orders and a manager in a chain of command

Now, #1 and #2 are actually perfectly reasonable and Apple should still hire him in that case. Most defenders seem to be saying it was case #3. That’s actually the worst choice and if that was the situation, I’d be on the Gruber bandwagon. Now, based on what I’ve read in the past, I think he’s taken position #1, but it may put Apple in a bind, not that I think they’d worry about it too much or feel a need to comment, but it will piss of the “Apple is always right” camp.

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One of the challenges of building a strong product management team is that most people don’t really know what a product manager is supposed to do. Typically, the responsibilities ascribed to the product manager are actually product marketing or program management. In some organizations, these might need to be part of the product manager job description, and they can be important aspects of the role.

In my experience, the most critical responsibility of product management is the application of the Pareto Principle to the influx of requirements that flood the product planning process. The Pareto Principle, also know as the 80/20 rule or the identification of the vital few and trivial many, is a simple heuristic that we tend to apply every day except when it comes to figuring out what to build and what not to build. What happens if this isn’t done correctly? Lots of very bad things…

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