Empathy with experience vs apathy being best of breed

Our HR team asked us to read the book Get rid of the performance review, by Samuel A. Culbert.  That book has a lot of bad mouthing of existing HR practices :-) BTW I will post my review about the book in another post.

Now getting back to my observation while reading that book which was also triggered by a discussion with a family friend who is in the HR team of a large IT Services company.


Hiring an experienced HR manager who does not understand your company vs promoting someone who has been an employee all along as HR manager has a huge difference. The first one knows industry best practices and knows how things are in other companies. He ends up being more mean and will keep the company's prospects foremost.

However the one that is promoted from down the ranks, understands the nuances of the company culture. The later one may lack knowledge of the best practices followed in the industry. However his ability to work with the "HRed" is surely better and can help create a conducive environment that helps build a great company.

So if you want to be a people friendly company, then you know what you should do.

But more importantly weigh your options well when choosing between experience over best of breed.

$100 Million niches normally exist in a $1 Billion Software Market

Product feature prioritization is a constant challenge that product managers face. Now when you focus on a huge market opportunity, focus first on a niche segment.

This is especially necessary if you want to keep your marketing and support costs low.

Take Project Management as an example.

Project management tools are needed by development teams.

Project Management is needed when consultants do small projects for hundreds of clients over the year. This is another niche.

Small teams (less than 5) working as a close knit group would want to track common tasks they work on. This could be further segmented by considering that the potential users of your tool could be working from remote locations.

To make things more clear, if there are people working remotely, then chat integration, desktop sharing could be important than say a Gantt chart which is more useful for very complex projects with tens of people. If you have an independent consultant doing many small  projects a year, pricing per project will make it expensive for these small customers.

Identifying the segments is very critical.

Addressing it one after the other is the best strategy which is like addressing the $100 million niche before taking on the $1 billion market. Probably that is a hint on how you could prioritize your feature requests.

I may be generalizing an observation a bit, but I hope you get the drift.