Minimal product management
Like the simple, repeatable patterns of minimal music, there are ideas that provide structure for your product thinking while creating room for exploration, improvisation and chance.
Underneath all the frameworks and methodologies, behind the roadmaps and release plans, product management has well-established, repeatable elements that can bring clarity to almost any conversation or situation.
Minimal music repeats notes, tones and rhythms in combinations or layers that create texture, harmony and dissonance; minimal product uses straightforward ideas and approaches that create coherence, alignment and, when necessary, tension.
In musical terms, the minimalist movement started in the United States during the late 1950s and 1960s, though the term ‘minimal music’ wasn’t coined until 1968 by Michael Nyman writing in the Spectator magazine. Early practitioners include La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley.
Minimal music develops gradually but with purpose, through subtle variations and nuances often achieved just by changing single notes, beats or durations. Young’s music also makes extensive use of drones (sustained notes or tones), an example being his 1958 work Trio for Strings, written for the violin, viola and cello. Reich experimented with recordings and tape loops, as in his 1965 composition It’s Gonna Rain.
Minimalist compositions can be just a few minutes long and written for a single instrument, like this piano étude, or play out over several hours with many instruments and even a dance troupe, like in the opera Einstein on the Beach. Both were written by Philip Glass, whose music you’ve heard before if you’ve watched The Truman Show or Candyman.
Minimal music can be precisely annotated and choreographed, or left wide open to interpretation.
La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7 comprises only two notes (B and F#) that are ‘to be held for a long time’. There are no instructions stipulating what instruments should play the piece or in what number.
Terry Riley’s 1964 composition In C comprises 53 ‘cells’, melodic and rhythmic patterns ranging from 1 to 25 notes each. The entire score fits on a single page. There is no specified tempo but all the performers have to play at the same pace, set using a single instrument or improvised percussion.
Each performer must play the cells in order but can choose how many times to repeat each cell before they move on. Performers stop playing when they complete the 53rd and final cell, and when they’ve all done so, the performance ends.
The result of this ‘indeterminacy’ (deliberately leaving the music open to chance or interpretation) is performances as varied as the 40-minute In C Mali, filmed at the Tate Modern, this 55-minute Danish choral arrangement with simple percussion and instrumentation underneath interleaved vocal harmonies, or this much shorter version by Armenia-based seven-piece Ensemble Assonance.
The hard cell
What ‘cells’ could form the basis of the minimal product movement? I’d start with these four:
User-story mapping. As Jeff Patton put it, talking about the user’s journey through your product (and building a simple model) keeps your users and what they’re doing front and centre of your development. The idea really clicked for me listening to this episode of the No-Nonsense Agile podcast (as it was called then) and hearing Patton say that you reduce scope by taking out users, not features. User-story mapping can keep the whole business and your various stakeholders focused on who you’re building for at that moment, and what those users need.
Jobs to be done (JTBD). This way of thinking pushes you to look beyond your product or a specific set of features into the life of your user, who exists with or without your product. I know JTBD is a framework, but as Bob Moesta puts it, the ‘job’ is a need that your customers are trying to fulfil, and the essence is that understanding the job and the user’s ‘struggling moment’ keeps you attuned to their needs.
Outcomes (over outputs). Taking Josh Seiden’s definition of an outcome as ‘a measurable change in human behaviour that drives business results’, in this ‘cell’ you can align user stories and jobs to the observable changes you want to see in how people use the product. Focusing on outcomes is what enables product teams to respond to feedback and come up with true measures of success, rather than deliver a set of pre-ordained outputs of debatable value.
The Four Big Risks. Will users choose (and be able to use) your product? Is it technically feasible to build with the skills and technology at your disposal? Will the solution work across different parts of the business? Marty Cagan’s four big risks comprise the ‘cell’ you might repeat the most, as you resolve the tensions and trade-offs between them and work iteratively towards a useful end product.
Those are my minimal-product equivalent of the simple, repeatable patterns used in minimal music. You might have others.
The key thing is that each ‘cell’ is open to interpretation and adaptable to different circumstances. The cells can be repeated as often as required, in whatever sequence or combination is required, and performed just as well by multi-disciplinary product teams as by cross-functional groups working organisation-wide.
You won’t only do minimal product management, in the same way you wouldn’t only listen to minimal music.
But when you start to experience framework fatigue or you can no longer hear your users among the many voices competing for your attention, stop and focus.
Do you know which users you’re building for? Do you know the job they’re trying to do? Do you know the outcomes you’re trying to achieve? And are you addressing the risks involved?
It might not sound like much, and it certainly won’t be easy, but it will often be enough.
Recommended listening
Recommended reading
The Emergence of Minimalism by Jonathan Cross
Terry Riley’s In C: A Journey Through a Musical Possibility Space by Tero Parviainen. Scroll down for audio clips overlaid over the corresponding ‘cell’ of Riley’s score
'In C' Forever: The eternal evolution of Terry Riley's minimalist masterpiece by Tom Huizenga
Framework fatigue is real (though they’re helpful when you’re just starting out). But JTBD has never let me down.
In my case, the fatigue also comes from practical reasons😂: Miro/canvases of other frameworks get cluttered fast, but JTBD stays focused, skimmable and memorable. Even for complex, multi-sided product suites.
What's been your experience?
I’ve found user-story maps generally best for thinking through the known (or assumed) steps in a journey the way a user would think about them, but JTBD is easily the most reliable way of arriving at insights that can change your whole perspective on a problem, like in Bob Moesta’s classic milkshake-for-breakfast example.
Miro board clutter could be an article in itself... 😂