Product

Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

It’s a little provocative but I believe that even the best projects should - but do not necessarily - lead to delivering value. (I expressed this thought once to a colleague who built a career as a project manager and they became highly offended. I should’ve been more clear on exactly what I meant. Mea culpa.)

A project mindset sometimes develops that focuses on the milestones rather than the value, and while it feels good to be busy and GTD it can’t take the place of doing only the valuable things.

Rather than building a project mindset, I believe in building a product mindset, where there is no end (like a project), and the focus is on who the customer is and what they need. There are, of course, terrible products everywhere but a true product mindset will always put value over parameters, timelines and busywork.

How do you see things: is the distinction useful? Do you use a project or a product mindset, or something else?