Life is a series of passages or developmental stages, all of which end up at some level of wisdom and mastery for each of us. This level depends upon our natural gifts and talents in combination with how we learn from our experiences. Product as path defines success with a different definition than product as profit. Product as path places emphasis on the motivation to learn the multiple dimensions of product development and to develop the needed skills that we can derive from the product development experience.
Personally, I spent a large part of my career resisting sales and marketing. I placed that part of product development into a special box and labeled myself with another set of skills that excluded the ones that I didn’t want to work on. The result, my path was more narrow and took longer than it should have with more time spent avoiding the important pieces than overcoming my learned limitations.
It’s pretty easy to separate the dimensions of product development into neat categories that you like and dislike. For example, if you lean toward the creative side, you may only want to concentrate on the “juicy” acts of creativity and inventiveness, leaving the “nuts and bolts” of research, marketing, sales, and distribution to others, or in many cases even overlook some of these “hard” critical elements, placing your entire product development in jeopardy.
Product as path is a success attitude and a positive point of view. The objective is to use the product development process as the personal development process. It’s a way to learn the “big picture” of product success and to sharpen a wide variety of personal development skills, all of which will be vital to your future in the world of business. It is a positive mind set designed to tackle all areas of product success as a pathway to personal development. The “big picture” for product success is going to contain a broad range of challenges, some that come easy and some that demand a strong new commitment and endless hours of time before you will be able to understand and master the critical pieces of the product puzzle. Product as path raises the bar for product success adding an important element to the product as profit model that concentrates on product development from the inside out.
PRODUCT SUCCESS TOOLBOX: Product As Path
- What areas of your product development do you resist?
- What do you tell yourself about those particular areas?
- Do you consider your product development a “path” of learning?
- What are you willing to do differently?
NEXT: What is a successful product? Product as Purpose