1 + 1 = 3

(Or, How Products Grow)

I’d like to use a business/product idea to help illustrate what I’ve been rolling around in my noggin.

Let’s use a social media site for pizza fans. We’ll call it — Pizza🍕Party.

It's gonna be awesome. 🥳

Pizza🍕Party launches and adds all the standard social media fun-time things; Posts, but they're called Slices 🍕(amazing 🤯), Photos, Likes, Friends, etc.. and a Home Feed to view it all.

Photo by Yoav Aziz on Unsplash. Fictional image of the future experience of Pizza🍕Party. Look how happy those phones are.

The social media app is what I’m thinking of as the "first product". All of the business’s focus is on ways to expand it. And so it grows.

It gets the full workup. A way to list out your favorite pizza places and share them on a map. A premium plan that gives you a super special icon on your profile. Short, user created, pizza videos you can scroll through. Swiping left or right to vote on your favorite pizza toppings, then seeing if anyone else’s favs match yours.

In short, Pizza🍕Party is crushing it.

Sure, there's flame wars over if pineapple belongs on pizza but that part is not really a surprise.

All in all, it's just folks connecting with others online over their shared love of pizza. 😍

So, what’s next?

The current landscape often requires continued growth and more products need to be added. After thought, research, and some number crunching it’s decided to launch….

Pizza🍕Party IRL - “Meetup with pizza people near you!”

It will be epic.

This is where 1+1= 3

This looks like two products.

• Pizza🍕Party Online — the original Pizza🍕Party social media site that kicked it all off.

• Pizza🍕Party IRL — the new in person product.

But there’s a third.

• The shared space for Pizza🍕Party Online and Pizza🍕Party IRL.

The shared space

Customers interact, use, and manage settings for their PizzaPartyOnline and PizzaPartyIRL in a singular place.

It’s one website. One Portal. One app. To users… all of this is just, Pizza🍕Party. It’s all the same company.

How do decisions get made for things that are shared across product lines? A few examples:

• Should privacy or notification settings be different for each product line? If so, should those be managed where users interact with that product or would it be better to have a common settings area?

• Who should own things like registration, billing info, or profile settings?

• How should content and settings that are really only useful for one of the products be handled - in the product’s area or the shared area?

• Who decides what the landing page is after a user authenticates into Pizza🍕Party - the social site or the IRL site? Maybe it should be configurable? Or maybe it should be a mix of both content sources?

• On top of all of this, how does a user see, understand, and configure all of these choices?

Let’s not forget all the technical infrastructure or user experience challenges that come along with adding this new product. (Or when mergers happen for that matter, but that’s a different email 😉)

When there was a single service it made sense that the product team driving that service kinda owned the whole thing… but now, who decides all of this? 👆 It’s a lot.

Often I see these questions handled as an afterthought or owned by whichever team happens to be creating a feature that needs a place to live. They pick what’s best for them, right then, and get ready to launch 🚀. Move fast and break things, indeed.

This stuff is important to our customers… what should we be doing?

Here’s my pitch

This is why I laid out the Pizza🍕Party scenario (plus, it’s a wicked good idea… all you potential co-founders and angel investors out there….. call me 🤙🤓).

The shared space should be treated as it’s own Product

This shared space, the platform that consists of the interfaces that users see and the backend infrastructure that support them, is a strategic part of the business and should have it’s own product focus.

The shared space is large and needs a product person to focus on it and prioritize the requests from different teams as they build the products that depend on it.

I’m not prescribing an approach (yet 😁). Everyone’s situation will vary. What I do want to suggest is that it’s clear who owns the shared platform and that they have the budget to support it, time to focus on it, and the authority to make decisions on what, and how, things should be done.

Someone needs to be dedicated to it sooner rather then later

If the product organization has grown to the point where there’s enough people to disagree - so, two - it’s time to pick an owner for the shared space.

It can’t wait until the company is bigger, or older, or has more cashflow to deal with it. I’m not saying it needs a dedicated team of product managers, designers and engineers from day one, but it shouldn’t be ignored for long.

The more time that passes a pile of (potentially avoidable) tech debt, UX debt, and product debt grows. Crazy enough, all that accumulated debt seems to jam up the works right at the point when the company needs to make headway on something critical.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” so the saying goes.

A final thought

I can spend all day talking about “shared product spaces”. In this post I hope it was clear when I think this product comes into being and why it’s worth an organization’s attention from the start.

In addition, I believe it’s one of the most important products any company has - but that’s a topic for a different day. 😎

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Please leave a comment on this post or reach out to me directly via my website.

Thanks for reading,

✌️