Money 2.0 Stuff: The Facebook Start Up methodology

There’s this concept in product management, I imagine, where you think of a product and then you iterate on design, and then you build it. It sounds complicated, and it probably is, but it’s also quite straightforward, no? Like, you think of a product, you build the product, you release the product. Maybe some people don’t like the product, and they give you some feedback, and then you change some things around and come back with a new version of the product and then hopefully things work out. If you subscribe to the Lean Start Up methodology these cycles might be quite frequent, I don’t know.

But, like, maybe we’ve had it wrong this whole time? Like maybe the right way to go about product management is to put together hundreds of pages of whitepapers, gather a group of potential partners, testify multiple times in front of Congress, and then admit that you will literally do whatever it takes to get the product out, even if that means changing the product entirely? Like, yes, sure, that might make you look a bit, well, surreally disorganized, but who cares, it’s not as if you are a $500bn market cap multinational, are you? Are you?