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The OpenAI dashboard is a lesson in product management Sophia Willows

The OpenAI dashboard is a lesson in product management | Sophia Willows

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The core thesis of this page is that as a product manager you need to have a very clear sense of the business drivers that equate to success, and a robust attitude to only prioritising the features that support those drivers.

The example is a desired feature on the OpenAI dashboard that appeared only recently despite lots of prior feedback from users that it was important to them. Tags: #productmanagement

Highlights

  • We have a feature request that is…entirely reasonable (some would even say that it’s table-stakes for an API with pricing like OpenAI’s)trivial to implementrequested by a lot of customersA less disciplined product team would have implemented this feature a long time ago. I’ve personally been in a lot of product meetings where some or all of these reasons have been used to justify adding a feature to the roadmap. The difficult pill to swallow for a lot of people is that none of these are particularly good reasons for scheduling in the work. — Updated on 2024-02-01 — Group: #synesthesia-pvt
    • Tags: #productmanagement
    • Annotation: Just because lots of people want a feature that is easy to implement, even seems "obvious", those shouldn't impact on your decision to implement.
  • The ultimate point of building any new feature is to generate some kind of business return. The fact that a bunch of existing customers have requested a feature is orthogonal to whether doing that work will generate a return. It’s entirely possible for something to be widely-requested and have no bearing on churn rate or conversion rate — Updated on 2024-02-01 — Group: #synesthesia-pvt
    • Tags: #productmanagement
    • Annotation: The key point is to focus on your business drivers - those are independent of whether existing users want something - their want might translate to lower churn (or some other driver), equally it may make no difference.

Ask yourself "will lack of this feature turn away a new customer or cause an existing customer to cancel their contract?". If the answer is "no" then it's a low priority.