Rian Van Der Merwe > Quotes

“What’s the use of fast iteration if all it does is get us to a suboptimal solution more quickly,”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“For product managers to succeed, there needs to be an executive mandate and company-wide understanding that even though everyone gets a voice, product decisions ultimately reside with product managers.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“Mike Monteiro takes on this issue by attacking the humble calendar in “The Chokehold of Calendars2”: Meetings may be toxic, but calendars are the superfund sites that allow that toxicity to thrive. All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re a battlefield over who owns whose time.”
― Rian van der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“The product manager’s mission is to achieve business success by meeting user needs through the continuous planning and execution of digital product solutions.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“Collaboration is different. In collaboration cultures people understand that even though everyone gets a voice, not everyone gets to decide. People are able to air their opinions, argue passionately for how they believe things should be done, and try to negotiate compromises. But it certainly doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with every decision.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“customers through the product development process.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“It is vastly easier to identify market problems and solve them with technology than it is to find buyers for your existing technology.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“Arriving at a company as a new (or sometimes, the first) product manager can be daunting. Product management is usually introduced in an organization once there is such a high level of internal enthusiasm and chaos that the leaders aren’t sure how to handle it any more. And then everyone looks to the product manager to “manage stuff.”
― Rian van der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World

“There are many shiny objects out there, and if we focus on those (or on impressing the VCs who are focused on them) to the neglect of usefulness, we might find ourselves in a situation similar to that of only a few years ago, when we built Flash intros on every site just because we could.”
― Rian Van Der Merwe, Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World